


Smooth Criminal 3 - Together Again

by PsychicAbsol



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon (Anime)
Genre: Betrayal, Destruction, F/F, Imprisonment, Lesbian Character, Minor Violence, Past Relationship(s), Psychic Abilities, dragon attack
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-08-07
Updated: 2015-11-28
Packaged: 2018-04-13 11:11:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 35,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4519704
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PsychicAbsol/pseuds/PsychicAbsol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>„What the criminal code of honor usually forbids: Turning onto another team without reason. But when you’ve already broken the rules and worked with the good guys, what’s there left for you to do? And surely, the home city of your not-yet-but-almost girlfriend being attacked is enough of a reason for treason, right?” Third part of the “Smooth Criminal” series. Sabrina x J.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: Sequel to the sequel of “Smooth Criminal”, which was originally planned to be a one-shot, but I am mentally unable to keep it at that. More action-driven than the past parts, but, as usually, I’ll try to keep the humor up. 
> 
> J’s family connections and her past relationship are made up. 
> 
> About the timeline: Takes place a few weeks after “SC2”, still during the DP series. Around DP 140. After the Regigigas episode, but before the Galactic arc.

Part I 

The commodities a normal, seven-to-five job offers for the individual were obvious. Steady income, fixed working times, free weekends and even annual leave, in which you could paint the town red. 

In case of a criminal employed at Team Rocket, you painted the town red with the blood of your enemies, of course. 

Things look quite differently, though, when you are a free lancing criminal and have to scrape together your income and what you desire to pay your henchmen, if you paid them at all, all by yourself. 

Jean Hunter, or Hunter J, as she liked to call herself for anonymity issues that had backfired oh so many times on her already, knew that all too well. 

Now, the last weeks had been unusually lucrative even for her. After catching the giant Dragonite at Cerulean Sea with a secret league project whose blue prints had been given to her by somebody that she came to dub as her secret sweetheart, she had also almost managed to catch a Regigigas at Snowpoint Temple. If it hadn’t been for these meddling kids who seemed to stalk her, she would have succeeded. Not that it mattered, anymore. Her client had paid in advance. His mistake. 

That meant that, even though she had no concrete assignments, she was well situated in the meantime and could allow herself a short vacation in Sinnoh’s South. All the while her henchmen were buckling and sweating under the harsh sun, as they were responsible for the ship’s condition. She was merely there to control their handling, and occasionally punish them if they forgot to polish the windows. 

All in all, she was pretty relaxed and that opened up the gates for an entirely different kind of musings. She thought back about her younger brother Zero, who had, if not helped, then at least not bumbled into her way when they had confronted their older brother Lawrence on behalf of the league, when the brainless maniac that he was had tried to capture the legendary bird trio of Johto. With the help of two of Johto’s Elite trainers, William Bender and his girlfriend Karen, they had managed to defeat Lawrence and imprison him, resulting in another hefty monetary compensation for her. She supposed with all the money she had made in recent times, she could buy a house, settle down, maybe even look for a more legal job. 

J snickered. Yeah right, and tomorrow, Lawrence opened up a star-rewarded jail restaurant. She leaned back in her beach lounger, enjoying the harsh sun under her sunglasses, a tropical drink right at her side. She didn’t plan for this to be a very long vacation, just a few days relaxing, calming the nerves. 

She didn’t expect her rest to be disturbed so abruptly and severely, though. 

One of her henchmen approached her. She didn’t even know his name- something Russian, maybe?- since she never bothered to learn their names, anyway. A cold, old “Hey you, asshole” was directive enough, and always found a recipient. 

“Captain, I want to report to you that there’s an uproar in Kanto.” 

J sighed and pushed the sunglasses back on her nose. “And why, my dear brainless failure of normal functioning, is that of my concern?” 

The man gulped visibly, but there was something in this eyes that told J that he wasn’t here to barely bother her, as her henchman usually tended to. This was something more serious. 

“Well, captain…the uproar’s origin’s in Saffron.” 

J waited for him to elaborate, but when nothing happened, she straightened her back and sat up. “News already covering it?” 

“Yes, madam.” 

“Get me a TV. I want to take a look myself.” 

She didn’t really care how they managed to get hold of a TV in just about two minutes, nor how they managed to balance the device to the pool area, nor did she spend much thought to how they powered it up. All that mattered was that the- admittedly, small, TV soon showed pics that reminded her of the geeky monster movies her younger brother loved to watch. 

Only that in fantasy, the dragons were green and not bright orange, and while they often preferred to destroy the biggest city in vicinity, they were stopped by the good guys before they could actually endanger human life. 

This, however, was way too realistic for her taste. 

Minutes went on as J silently watched the news reporter, more and more buzzwords arriving, until she read what she had been hoping to avoid deep inside. 

“Gym leader currently missing.” 

J closed her eyes. She took a deep breath. 

“Start the ship. Pack everything and everyone. Stock up on food, gas and weapons.” 

She opened her eyes. “We’re going back to Kanto.” 

Scene Change 

Going back in time and flying a few thousand miles North, we find ourselves in the office of your standard wanna-be Mafioso, who had no problem still paying total failures such as Jessie and James and their talking cat, and was himself certainly not above actions that would be risky at best, outright suicidal at worst. 

And what he was planning on conducting now was something so entirely out of this world, that no one sane could even try to comprehend any reason for it, except simply megalomania. 

It was one thing to try to take over Kanto’s main commercial city. That even made a certain amount of sense. After all, all the money of the world was made, shuffled, spend and burned here, not explicitly in that order. Taking over Saffron basically meant taking over all of Kanto’s economic power, and therefore, made sense. 

Doing so with the help of an overgrown Dragon that destroyed buildings, willingly and rather most often, unwillingly by simply moving that huge butt with tail attached of it? 

Did not make much sense. 

After all, how much was all that money worth when you caused a breakdown of the financial market by crushing every bank and market that existed, along with quite a few stock brokers? 

Not that these weren’t replaceable, but they made an awful mess when squashed by Dragonite’s feet. 

Still, the head honcho of the Rockets did not care about all the collateral damage that his newest pet created by simply waltzing. He had by now, in all senses of the word, gone insane, and sadly, he was quite efficient and successful in it. He had somehow managed to carry the large Dragonite into the city without anyone noticing, had even duped the league by using an invention they had been working on to capture the large Pokemon (or, at least, he had paid someone else to do that for him), and, in the end, he had avoided the league’s agents by tricking them. He had all the right to gloat to his underlings about his invincibility. 

He had forgotten about one crucial detail, though. 

Saffron possessed- or was possessed, rather, by one of the strongest gym leaders. 

Who, at the moment of attack, had long since foreseen it and had decided to take matters into her own hands. 

Which surely explained how she was fully absent from the board of play so far. 

Scene Change 

J had seen a lot of battle stages in her life. It came with being a high ranking criminal, she guessed, who took on fights with legendaries. It took a lot to impress her when it came to battle damage. She had seen whole forests burned down, she had seen lakes dried clean, with helpless fish Pokemon left to flap until the sun burned them into chips, hell, she had seen mountain caps being blasted off by angry Pokemon. 

Still, seeing the damage done to the city she had visited less than half a year ago, under quite different circumstances, shocked her. It looked a bit as if an overgrown baby had decided to use the skyscrapers as its plaything, and turned them upside down to spill their filling out. 

Which might actually have been the truth, now that she considered it. 

Impressive, it truly was, for she remembered the Dragon to be hardly a tenth the height of most of Saffron’s average skyscrapers. 

Still, it helped that the Dragonite was capable of flight and of hyper beam. That certainly compensated for other shortcomings. 

“Madam?” Her attention had been so captured by the Dragonite that she almost overheard the head commander. She shook her head rapidly to clear it out of the haze it had been caught it. She had seen the very same Pokemon just weeks ago, and nothing had changed that made it any more or any less interesting. 

Except that it was now on a killing rampage, which might be relevant to her interest on several levels, actually. 

“Madam? What are we supposed to do now?” Her head commander asked. 

She would have slapped him for his rude question if not for the fact that he had a point. They were now in Saffron- or rather, as close to the city as they could without facing the danger of being noticed by either the Pokemon itself, or the several Rocket agents that were likely spread out over the areal. 

Team Rocket had definitely pulled out the big guns to take over Saffron. 

While it was definitely out of the usual for J to nick the Pokemon of a criminal organization, it was, she mused, in theory not all that different from taking a Pokemon from your average trainer. Only that the Pokemon itself was anything but average, and that made things complicated again. 

She rubbed the bridge of her nose. She had succeeded in catching the Dragonite weeks ago, but only because she had used the most foolish possible way at her disposal, which had been dumping her own prototype of the Enormous Ball on its head and hoping that this misinterpreted tea bagging kind of improvised tactic worked. Which it had, obviously, since she had been able to transfer the Dragon to Team Rocket not much later, but that also meant that she had not found a suitable way of weakening the giant Pokemon. Relying on the league’s techniques had made it too easy for her, which now came back to bit her back hard in the ass. 

As did the fact that leaving overhasty hadn’t been the best idea she’d had in the last days as well. 

J shook her head. Dealing with the Dragonite was one thing, finding the gym leader another. And that other thing was, honestly, what had been her objective coming to the city, anyways. She could care less about how much property was unwillingly leveled. 

That was not her Pidgey. 

Therefore, the intermediate goal seemed clear. 

“We’ll land, and I’ll take the ATV to slap through the city to the gym. You’ll stay behind, giving me rear cover in case the Dragonite notices. Don’t hesitate to throw yourself in the fireline if it becomes necessary. You’re replaceable, I’m not, and your paychecks won’t cover themselves.” 

“Yes, captain!” 

She didn’t wait to see which henchman chose to be the first cannon fodder. Her cape wiping the floor around her ankles, she rushed to the car pool and waited for the descend. 

Tearing through the streets of Saffron, J took note of her wise foresight to install the newest road map of the capital. Not that even that helped her in the rush hour that was caused by a giant monster attacking the city core and everyone else being sane and trying to go the other way to the outer skirts of the city, but it gave her a voice to snarl at whenever she was told by the annoying mechanic to turn around at the next opportunity. 

“Got the best angle dozer far and wide doing the demolition for them, and their biggest concern is reconstructing the paving.” She snarled, as she overtook a construction vehicle blocking the road in front of her. She didn’t spare a thought about the unusual way the car was placed – usually, one did not park upside down, but instead, she waltzed right through the metal, mechanics and seats with her van. She grinned when she hit a hydrant on her way. “Who the hell designs these roads, anyway?” She snarled, failing to realize that she wasn’t even using aforementioned roads anymore, but pretty much making her own way through downtown Saffron, entirely confusing the hell out of her satnav, which had obviously not been constructed in mind with free-thinking persons who took liberties with the definition of a road and declared literally everything a road that was not blocked by walls. 

And even those were just bothersome obstacles that could easily be cracked by the right vehicle. Might made it right at its best. 

“You didn’t just tell me that I’m speeding, did you!?” She snarled at the obnoxious female voice of her satnav, very close to calcifying it before she realized that her device might not work on a machine. 

Seconds later a red light momentarily blinded her. 

“…I wasn’t just fined for speeding, was I?” J sarcastically asked no one in particular, even though her satnav kept insisting that she should slow down. “I can slow down once I’m dead, you batshit thing!” She snarled, cutting a corner so hard she accidently ripped off half the wall. Which didn’t add much to the overall damage, as the building seemed to be close to toppling over by simple grace of the Dragonite alone. 

“Of course, the real challenge here is not finding the gym, but a parking lot…” J paused, before waltzing down a park bench. Best suitable replacement she could find in the meantime, and hey, she was in a _parking_ space, right? 

She took a glance outside before she jumped out of the van. She would have let Salamence or Drapion loose, but chances were high that the Dragonite would detect the two rival Pokemon, and attack them swiftly. 

“Okay…gotta ask her later if the architect was eccentric, or plain drunk.” She put a hand to her hip as she walked up to the gym. The first time she had been in Saffron, she hadn’t had any time actually to do some sight-seeing- obviously, and hadn’t been able to marvel at the wonder that was the umbrella-shaped psychic gym. 

Gyms in Sinnoh tended to be less impressive, and less eccentric, although, sadly, the same couldn’t be said about the corresponding gym leaders. That, J mused, was a rule of nature. No matter where you were, the gym leader was always the local freak who had lost his marbles a while ago. 

But at least they were as modern as they could be. Automatic doors, anyone? When was the last time she had seen such a thing in a government sponsored building? 

Actually, every Pokemon Center had automatic doors, but it wasn’t as if J could just walk into your average Pokemon Center without expecting to be grounded by a dozen police officers moments later. 

Given the state the whole city was in, she expected the gym to be in turmoil, with several people running like Torchics after their heads had been cut off, or the gym to be totally deserted. There was always the possibility that Team Rocket had been wise enough to do away with the pesky psychics as soon as they got the chance to do so, and that, J noticed angrily, made her stomach tight with something akin to fear. 

But what she found, in the end, was neither a chaos nor a startling emptiness, but, if she hadn’t known it to be different, what she expected to be an everyday business activity. 

People training their strange powers, people training their strange powers with their Pokemon, people on lab coats experimenting on liquids that looked like they should only be consumed by one’s enemies, and people typing away on laptops or reading thick books with determined faces. All in all, it was so calm, so average, so _normal_ that she started to question her satnav. This could neither be a psychic gym, not a psychic gym in the middle of a dragon-powered Team Rocket invasion. 

She might have been so entirely confused by the situation that it took her a few moments to notice that someone was standing besides her, politely coughing and waiting for her to regain her composure. 

“Good day, m’lady. What might you be here, for?” 

She blinked, and turned around, ready to snarl at whoever _dared_ to ‘lady’ here when she wasn’t even forty yet and _barely_ She stared blankly at the display of Telekineses, long enough for the man to scan her over and read her thoughts. 

Like father, like daughter, after all. 

“You’re looking for Sabrina.” 

J blanched. “And what if I am?” She retorted lamely, fully knowing that it was useless arguing with someone who already knew about your intentions before you yourself even did. 

The man sighed. “I know where she is, but…I am unsure if I should give away her location to you.” He folded his arms over each other and looked sternly down at her. 

J snarled angrily. This was really not the time for playing games with her! She could have turned him into stone, surely, but that wouldn’t help her along. She didn’t want to make a bad first impression on the employees of the gym. Not because that might shed her in a bad light in the eyes of Sabrina, that too, maybe, a little, the tiniest bit, but _first_ and _foremost_ , of course, she didn’t want to anger any psychic, of course. 

“And why would that be?” J asked sarcastically. 

“Well, why should I trust you with this exclusive, confidential information?” 

J would have sworn that her first reaction wasn’t to shout ‘Because she’s my girlfriend’, but to say that she wanted to rescue her, but somehow, her two intentions got mixed up on the way from brain to tongue, and what she blurted out in the end was: 

“Because I want to rescue my girlfriend.” 

J paused and hit her palm against her forehead. ‘Way of you to go, old girl, way to go…’. Only to censor herself. ‘Not _that_ old…” 

He took a deep breath, and looker her over more closely this time. J crossed her arms over each other as well, glaring in his direction. What right did he have to judge her for a sentence she had, obviously, just uttered accidently? Why did he feel the need to review her like an expensive piece of Kantonese Miltank meat before searing her from both sides? 

“So, you want to rescue my daughter?” 

Well, he was Sabrina’s father, for starters. 

J would have furiously denied that her face fell at this point and she gulped. But in all honestly, even a Hunter J fell her confidence sink in front of the man who turned out to be the father of her actually-slightly love interest. 

“Yeah….?” She inquired meekly, trying to smile. For some reason, that would not work. 

He continued to look down at her, eyes blazing slightly. 

“Well, what if she does not want to be rescued?” 

J would have rolled her eyes if not for, first, the indignity of such an action, and, second, that she didn’t want to lose what little credibility she still had in front of this man. 

“Excuse me, sir, but there’s a giant Dragon outside eating your cohabitants alive, and the city looks as if it was used as a organ donor for the local brick producer, and you tell me the gym leader, who is officially missing, does not need help?” 

She realized a moment too late that this implied Sabrina to be incompetent, but the words had already been blurted out. 

The man seemed to roll his eyes. “Do you see us panicking?” He asked, slowly, as if talking to a retarded kid. 

J, again, would have taken offense, but thanks to genetics and family connections, she was at his mercy. 

No, she did not frantically want to stay on good terms with the man that was the father of her still-not-quite-admitted love interest, of course not. 

“No, I don’t, but…” 

She never got to finish her sentence. Something shook the building, something that felt like an unnatural heavy and short-lived earthquake. J barely managed to hold her balance, while the man fell to his knee. 

Moments later, J saw the front doors being blasted away by a Houndoom’s solar beam, and heard screams of shock and fear all throughout the building. 

“Care to repeat your question?” She asked sarcastically. 

The man answered in just the same fashion. “Unless you have been just under a rock and did not get the memo, I think you got your answer there.” 

J had been ready to fight. Very much so. She supposed that it had been her good foresight to bring along her Pokemon, but then again, given the overall situation, it would have been foolish to waive them. She was dully aware of the fact that she was outnumbered, clearly so. Even with the dozens of gym trainers around, not all of them armed by Pokemon it seemed, they altogether were at a disadvantage simply brought upon by typing. Team Rocket had, of course, brought their Dark and Steel type Pokemon, which oh so happened to have an advantage against her half-dragon type Salamence and her half-poison type Drapion as well. 

But all of these calculations were for the naught, either way, when something hit her from behind. She didn’t even have time to register what it was before she tumbled over, arms pinned to her side by an electric ring, and suddenly, a volt bustled through her every muscle fiber and, as the cherry on top, someone had the guts to kick her with his dirty boots in the back of her head. She fell over, unconsciously. 

Scene Change 

Miles north of Saffron, close to the sea, a young man sipped his tea, legs crossed over each other, not a single crease visible in his cherry red suit. The man, green hair curly and short, looked up as his guest’s attention suddenly drifted away from their urgent topic. 

“As I have been saying, the ancient village worshipped a special kind of… M’lady, is there something bothering you?” He asked, not taking his eyes away from the freshly brewed mint tea imported from Johto. 

The woman didn’t answer him for a long time, just staring at the wall opposite of him as if expecting a portal to sudden open upon her glance. 

Given who she was, this was not entirely impossible. 

Finally, she stood up, putting her own white porcelain tea cup onto the coffee table. “Excuse me, Mr. Hatch. I will have to leave you for a while. There is something I need to do.” 

Scene Change 

J had gone through her fair share of headaches all through her life. Some of them the consequence of partying a bit too hard after a successful capture, which usually ended with her trying to deal even worse pains to her henchmen. The noticeably smaller part of her headaches had been induced by head trauma, and she had been proud and fairly intend on keeping it that way, as every injury she suffered meant one less she had caused herself. 

Regaining consciousness was a bit hard when it seemed as if gravity had not decided if it should return in full effect yet, and your surroundings were shaking like the insides of a snow globe, sans the actual snow. 

Shaking her head proved to be an even more futile attempt, as all it did was making her vision swim even worse. The hunter winced and held onto the steel bars for support, realizing at the same time that she was, in fact, behind prison bars. 

She groaned. She could have gone without a repetition of history for a while, very much so. 

“So you’re awake?” A young, shrill voice called out to her. 

J blinked, trying to figure out who, in this mess of colors that was the room she was being held in against her will, was the speaker. After a moment, it became obvious, because no umbrella stand would wear a bobbling blond wig. 

“No, I’m sleepwalking.” She joked, rapidly blinking to clear her vision of the many stars that were killing the mood and her nerves. 

The laugh that reached her ears afterwards was piercing and shrill, and felt like a spike right through her ear drums. “So you actually got a sense of humor there. That’s unexpected, Rumor has it that you’re quite the sour one, Miss Jean Hunter.” 

J tried to let her eyes focus long enough on the person in front of her to register details, but all she got was a swirly mess of features and colors. 

“And after everything that has happened, I’m sure you have all the more reason to be…” 

J snarled. “Glad to hear that my reputation still precedes me here…” 

She may have not been able to put a name on the face of the banana-blond haired girl in front of her with the striking purple eyes, but the emblem that bore the single red letter had embedded itself so strongly into her memory that it would take more than a blow to the back of her head to make her forget it. To tell the truth, sometimes, she wished one blow or the other would have blasted these fractals of history out of her biography forever, but this kind of technology did not exist yet, and so, she had to live with it. 

The laugh in front of her made her feel as if she was misused as a bell tongue. “Of course it does. Team Rocket never forgets.” 

J glared upwards. It had taken her a good five minutes, but with every passing second, she was able to differentiate more between background and foreground objects, and colors finally decided to assign themselves to the correct zone. Just as she had feared, the building she was in bore the traditional signs of belonging to the most well-known criminal organization of Kanto: Minimal design, maximum opportunities for agony, and a certain classic cheesiness displayed by purposefully perforated water pipes that caused a constant dripping classified to be mental torture. 

All of that, though, did not scare J, or even fazed her much. Not only had she been through worse- Kanto’s prisons came to mind, but she had dealt far more creative and efficient anguish, and felt therefore ready for nearly everything Team Rocket could throw at her. 

Much more upsetting, in her mind, was the fact that all she was wearing was a thin nightgown she was most certain she had not been wearing before. 

Slowly, she looked up at her supposed captor, who shrugged and grinned. “Well, what do you expect? Couldn’t have let you keep all these pretty weapons, now could we? We don’t want to make it _too_ easy for you, do we?” 

“Did you strip me down?” J asked, eyes wide open with shock. 

The girl- barely a young woman, if J had to be honest, shrugged again, casually reclined against the faraway wall with crossed arms. “Sure.” 

“Are you perverted?” J asked, tongue pushed against her gum to keep herself from spitting foul words at the girl. 

“Hm, might be, actually.” 

J took a deep breath, and cradled her head in her palm. So this was how low Team Rocket had sunken in the meantime? 

“So, tell me…” J looked up to find the girl actually chewing bubblegum. There was a certain element to it that disgusted her, and it had nothing to do with the fact that the girl let spit flow all over her cheek as she obnoxiously bit through the pink blob. 

“You know, in my days, Team Rocket was a organization for killers, assassins and executioners, and not bored high schoolers.” 

Her question was met with the roll of an eye. “Never judge a book by a cover, will you, old hag?” 

J gnarled. She wasn’t _that_ old! Surely not old enough to be told off so coldly by this whippersnapper. 

“Hey, don’t give me that look! You could be my mom!” The girl rolled her eyes. 

J mimicked hr gesture. “Only if I were an extreme case of a Lolita.” 

The way the girl’s teeth glimmered made the hunter wonder if bleaching was legal at her age. “Who’s to say you weren’t?” 

“You’re one to tell…” J mumbled, unwilling to continue the verbal banter with the girl. Stripping her down casually and then accusing her of having an early puberty… 

“Well, what do you want from me…would you rather have a guy, like, I dunno, Blatch, or Petrel, or, heaven forbid, Giovanni himself have you strip down?” 

J rolled her eyes. “One by one…Butch finally joined for real?” He had been barely big enough to walk up the stairs on his own when she had last seen him, having the misfortune of being a toddler born into a Team Rocket family. “And does he still have that break of a voice that makes you want to ram a cane into your ear speculum? “ 

The girl grinned. “It got worse.” 

J groaned. “And Petrel’s still alive? Fuck, I thought by now, someone would have blasted that shriveled pea of a brain of his out, or ripped this bastard’s dick off. Isn’t he long overdue some wipe-down?” 

The girl shrugged. “You try to find that shape shifter when he does not want to be found. Knowing him, he could be hiding behind the tapestry of this room, and secretly be jerking off to our conversation. Or, alternatively, he already has as I took off your clothes.” 

J did not want to, but she couldn’t help glancing at the walls. Hiding behind the tapestry would indeed be a challenge, as they were surrounded by plain cobble stone. 

“And now, we come to the one million dollar question…Giovanni is still a thing?” 

“Of course. What did you expect?” 

“Someone to assassinate him, to be honest.” 

“Fat chance, lady. These days, no one gets close enough to home to even have the ghost of a chance.” 

J sighed. It had been too much of a hope to think that things had changed in a positive way. No, almost twenty years after her last brush with Team Rocket, it seemed the inner structure of the shady organization had not changed one bit. 

And had, unfortunately, decreased in sanity as well. 

“So now that we’re over reminiscing about past times, care to tell me what I’m being held for her against my will? I can’t remember actually interfering with your plans.” Well not actively, at least, and not out in the open, either. 

Unless Team Rocket took offense at her breaking the traffic laws of the city they were trying to conquer. 

“And while we’re at it, care to give me your name so I can call you a thing other than brat?” 

“Well, if you have to call me anything, lady, then call me Domino.” 

J suppressed a groan. “Back in my days, you would have been kicked out of the team with a boot stuck in your ass for such a cheesy nickname, girl. Or executed with a butter knife, and that would have been the merciful option.” 

“Well, things change, Hunter J.” 

J certainly got the crack at her own alias, but found it to be at least less childish than a name borrowed from a mainstream spy movie. 

“And as for why we captured you…well, we can’t have anything or anyone disturbing our takeover of the city. You being there might mess things up.” Domino tilted her head. “Especially since no seems to have a fucking idea as for why you were actually here. Tell me, I’m morbidly curious, what brought you back to the place you had just been imprisoned at almost half a year ago? Are you masochistic?” 

‘No, but madly enough to be in love with the gym leader’, J would have almost answered, before realizing that, in context of Team Rocket, this might not only open up old wounds, but make her sound mad indeed. 

For this was absolutely and totally untrue. She was not in love with the gym leader, clearly not. She just cared for her. A lot, apparently, since she had taken the risk of returning to Kanto when the danger that Team Rocket portrayed to her was immediate. 

“You can’t expect an uproar of that size not to attract other shady forces, girl. I was curious as to what you were actually trying to accomplish with the dragon that I, I might emphasize, captured.” 

“Do you want it back?” Domino asked, eyebrow raised, corkscrew curls bobbling. 

“No!” J answered, just a bit too fast to be actually convincing. Even though it had indeed not been her idea to recapture the Dragonite. She deemed it pretty close to impossible, either way, but now that she thought clearly about it for a moment, there seemed to be no other way to stop the attack on Saffron than to eliminate the Pokemon one way or another. 

Which, again, brought her to the question of why she was so eager to mess with Team Rocket’s actions when her original plan had only included saving the psychic. A goal she hadn’t come one step closer to fulfilling so far, she noted with a dull sigh. She still had no clue where Sabrina was hiding, other than that she seemed not to be in town, and that even her father had been unwilling to share information about her whereabouts. Not that she had given him any reason to trust her, either. Still, it would have been nice to be told if it was worth continuing to stay in Saffron, or if the psychic had long since abandoned the city. 

A sudden whirring sound to her left answered her question in a most unexpected way. 

Both J and Domino blinked at the sudden bright light that appeared to J’s right, filling the small prison cell with an unearthly sanctity. 

Given that the cell was barely big enough to contain one person, it certainly got crowded when a second person decided to rush in. 

Domino was the first to regain her composure. “Sabrina? The fucking gym leader? Did you decide to let yourself be captured?” She asked, incredulously. 

Sabrina would have answered in a similar way that this had certainly _not_ been her intention, hadn’t she been busy grabbing J’s hand and teleporting them out as swiftly as she had come burglarizing in. 

J landed unceremoniously on her butt, groaning as her spine dared to spear through her rear side. She felt close to naked without her jacket, her boots, and most of all, her equipment! 

“Damn it!” She had just recently gotten the replacement calcification gun, and now it seemed as if she had lost that valuable weapon again! 

She could have gone with no clothes, literally, as long as she was armed with something other than her wits and her sarcasm, as that was not going to shoot her enemies’ heads off in a duel. 

She supposed with a suppressed shudder that she could still flash them, in a sense, but that was not the kind of attack she felt she was good at utilizing. 

Taking in her surroundings, she at first noticed the fresh sea water and the sound of waves breaking against stony cliffs. They weren’t that many places in Kanto you could come close to the sea without tumbling off right into it, so the place they had ended up at was obvious. “We’re in Cerulean.” She said, actually to no one in particular, but Sabrina chose to correct her either way. 

“Cerulean Cliff, actually.” 

She walked past J, in the direction of the only source of light J could see. A small hut, located next to an immense lighthouse, right on the cliff. 

J blinked. She was no expert in Kanto’s landscape, but some things had managed to reach her ears as well. “Isn’t this where Bill Hatch, the Pokemon expert, lives?” 

“That is accurate. I was visiting Mr. Hatch before I became aware of the fact that you needed my help…again.” The psychic turned around, and J felt herself actually shrinking a bit under her dark stare. 

“Hey, not my fault I was captured by Team Rocket. I had no idea they were trying to get rid of me as well.” There was the slim chance she should have expected her interference to have that sort of effect, though. 

The glare Sabrina gave her as she walked towards the shack felt as if it was burning holes through her gown and chest. “You should not have tried to interfere, Jean. That was a very stupid thing of you to do.” 

J shrugged helplessly. “Well, excuse me if I was only trying to save you, actually!” 

“I had things under control. There was no need to come to my rescue. “ 

“Yeah, right, because you were obviously in town and keeping Team Rocket in check.” 

By now, J wasn’t sure if the heat centering on her heart was actually a charade of mind, or an actual trick of powers executed by Sabrina. She had seen the psychic angered, but she had never so far been the target of that emotion, and it made her feel slightly uncomfortable. Especially since it seemed to be well within the range of Sabrina’s abilities to roast her alive. 

“As a matter of fact, I was trying to find a way to deal with the Dragonite when you came ambushing in. I would have been further along in my findings if it hadn’t been for you, so yes, while I was not in town, I was certainly _looking_ for ways to keep Team Rocket in check.” 

“Shouldn’t be that hard, with your kind of power”, J countered, still sour about being unarmed and momentarily forgetting about the danger she was getting herself in here. 

For a moment, she might as well have been impaled on a spear, because that was how she felt like, and what Sabrina had likely intended with her glare. 

“I am not omnipotent, and I do not resort to needless violence.” 

“You do know that the Team attacked the gym?” 

“Yes, I do.” 

“And you do know that they likely took your dad as well- who I met, I might add, don’t think I made the best first impression, just warning you…” 

“Yes, I do know.” She sounded irritated, but there was something else in her voice that J could not put her finger on. 

“And hey, you know, it might be useful if I can actually get my gear back, my goggles, my gun, and my unsorted set of fifteen knives of different sizes and sharpnesses- that was a bargain buy, that thing…” 

“I _do_ know that you need your tools back, would you kindly stop patronizing!” Sabrina hissed suddenly with a sharp, sad undertone that J had failed to register so far. The hunter back away, gulping. She had not realized that the whole ordeal might worry the psychic after all. All things considered, it was her town, her colleagues and _her family_ that was now in the grasp of Team Rocket. 

J stopped. This hit home a lot closer than she had actually wanted it to. 

“Sorry, I was just thinking…well, considering how easily you teleported onto my ship, and now inside of the headquarters, which might not even be where I remember it to be…” J shrugged helplessly. “I thought it should be just as easy for you to teleport back into it. Sorry for making that assumption.” 

Sabrina stopped. They were barely a few meters away from the cabin now, and J could hear tinkering and talking inside. She wondered if Bill was alone in there, or if he had more guests. 

The psychic sighed. “I was able to teleport in because Team Rocket hadn’t expected me to interfere yet. I have been fairly…neglectful of criminal activity in my city for the past years.” 

‘And now this came back to bite you in the ass’, J silently added, well aware of the bitterness of her statement, before she remembered that the psychic could read thoughts. 

Again, Sabrina sighed. “Now that they know that I am interfering, their tactic will have changed. “ She paused, looking up into the sky. “They have their ways of keeping me out, Jean. I am afraid that even if it was my immediate goal, I would not be able to teleport back into the headquarters again. They will have backed it up.” 

J thought back hard. “Dark Pokemon?” She concluded. 

Sabrina answered with a nod. 

“Before they were aware of my presence, they had miniscule defense at the headquarters. Enough to subdue my students and family, I’m afraid, but it was not enough to keep me out. But by now, they’ll have brought in reinforcements, which will making entering the base much harder on second try.” 

J rolled her shoulders uncomfortably. Weeks ago, she would have insisted that she was out cold in that flimsy prison gown she wore, and she only moved her shoulders to get warm, but the realization that she was feeling something else was slowly creeping in. “I’m sorry.” 

Sabrina did not answer her. Instead, she went for the door, and nodded to J to follow her inside. 

The psychic was in without so much as a knock on the door, and J followed her, not knowing what else to do, and hoping that Bill Hatch, the man who had been studying the Dragonite for the greater part of his life, could actually help them out. 

End Part I


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the long wait. I was busy with my side-sortofmainnow-project, the “Point” universe, and real life. As a little compensation, this chapter is longer than all chapters before. Hope you enjoy it.

Part II

“Good evening, my ladies.” Bill swept in like a tidal wave, carrying a tray with tea, biscuits and mint chocolate with him. J sat down on the couch, legs closed carefully so as not to emphasize the fact that she was without underwear, as embarrassing as it already was. Worse was only the fact that she did not dare to ask Sabrina just yet to teleport her back to her ship so she could have a chance to redress, and take out her frustration on her henchmen. Her only alternative therefore was to grab the backrest of the couch as firm as she could. 

“Good to see you again this soon, Sabrina. Your unexpected departure had me worried.” 

Sabrina seemed to refuse to acknowledge Bill’sconcern, and took a delicate tea cup into her left hand, taking a slow sip. “This is good. Is this Matcha?” 

“It is, Sabrina. Finest brand of South Fuchsia, leaves actually, no industrial mixture.” 

The psychic nodded, taking another slow sip. 

“Have you baked these biscuits yourself, Bill?” 

“Yes, of course. The recipe is from my maternal grandma, who spend her childhood in Lavender, so there’s a lot of influence from local cuisine in them as well…particularly regarding the herbs, Lavenders love to use all kinds of herbs, but then, you should be familiar with that, Saffron is a stronghold for spice trade.” 

J felt as if she had fallen out of time a bit. And, as if the threat of an overgrown lizard wasn’t hot on their heels, actually. 

“I don’t want to particularly interrupt your tea party,”, actually she did,” but don’t we have some more pressing matters to discuss?” 

“Ah…” Bill leaned back in his wingback chair. “Ah, right, the Dragonite you mean…Miss Hunter, right? Sabrina didn’t get to introduce me to you in her rush, but she did mention your name.” 

J groaned inwardly. Likely, she had introduced her as her girlfriend again. 

“That said, congratulations on the wedding.” 

Screw that, the girl had obviously gone another step farther. 

J chose not to comment on that, hence she would have jumped at Sabrina and choked her for a while, which might have send a different message to Bill. Pretending to be married was one thing, but not even getting the fitting rings for it was an entirely different, totally unacceptable thing! 

She could have sworn she heard a small voice telling her ‘later’ therefore… 

“But to stay on the direr topic…before she had to leave, Sabrina and me were discussing possible origins of the Dragon. We were hoping that once we had a clue about where it came from, we might find ways to send the Dragonite back to there.” 

“Back to where? The Dragonite is not from this planet, or what?” 

“More like, not from this time period, as we speculated.” 

“Okay…I get it…I think?”Actually, J did not get a thing, but hell would freeze over before she admitted that. 

„That’s good, because I do not get a thing.” Bill answered, before grabbing the sugar tongs and letting two cubs drop into his cup. 

J’s face fell, before Sabrina could illuminate her more clearly. “The theory me and Mr. Hatch speculated on consists of the idea that in ancient times, Pokemon had a different physical structure than they have nowadays. Concretely, we’re speaking about gigantism. You are aware of one of the Islands belonging to the Orange archipelago? So called the ‘Island of the Giant Pokemon’, obviously for a reason?” 

“I thought that was an amusement park founded by Team Rocket.” J deadpanned. 

Sabrina nodded. “Yes, and no. Nowadays, it _is_ actually theme park, but what it centers around has a factual base in the history of the island. Apparently, separation from the mainland created a perfect environment for certain genetic diversions, in this case, Pokemon that grew to abnormal sizes. We are not talking about a Rapidash with a withers height of eighteen hands. We are talking about tree-sized Jigglypuff here.” 

J shuddered. Both at the thought of normally small Pokemon turning into real monsters, and at the thought of what kind of fortune was lurking there on the aforementioned island. 

“Was, J. Like I said, this was in the past. Likely three to four thousand years ago. Since then, most of the giant Pokemon have died out, and are only kept alive in the folktales of the islanders.” 

J paused. “And in Saffron’s city core.” 

“Precisely this is our assumption. It would not be unheard of for some exemplars to survive over the centuries, especially given how old Dragonites can actually get. 1,500 years wouldn’t be an impossible age.” 

Bill dipped his cookie into his tea. “It wouldn’t take a whole colony for one sole individual to survive the centuries, even if we, then, have to assume that the Dragonite we’re dealing with is very old, and therefore, very experienced. It certainly managed to avoid my research for well over ten years.” 

J tried to keep the twitch of the corner of her lip under control, but that proved to be hard when you realized that you had managed to catch a Pokemon that had avoided a well-dedicated scientist and collector for a whole decade. She would have liked to believe it was truly her skill that had mastered the ancient Dragon-type, but that seemed too good to be true. Had the Pokemon actually _wanted_ to be caught? And if yes, why by her? That made no sense in the least, but she wasn’t going to spill that little bit of inconsistency right in front of Bill, who, unlike her partner in crime, was well-affiliated with the league. 

Not that Sabrina wasn’t, but she at least had proven to be a bit more open-minded regarding crimes. 

“That’s all fine, but do we have proof for your theories?” 

Bill shrugged. “Not really. At least not until I can get a hold of the Dragonite. Or more precisely, of its teeth, so I can execute a dental analysis. This would bring out the most accurate estimation of its age. Unless I was to be provided with a blood sample, that, of course, would make my research that much easier.” 

“Of course, I’m fairly sure the Dragonite will just love to have a needle poked into its forearm after you’ve done with the annual root treatment.” J rolled her eyes. Asking her to catch the Dragonite was one thing. Asking her to make it sit still in a dentist’s chair was quite another. That was, if there existed one of fitting size. 

“Okay, whatever. Let’s assume, for a moment, that the Dragonite is actually the lone survivor of a giant subspecies of Pokemon. How does that help us along in our plan to keep the Pokemon from bulldozing Saffron?” 

J felt Sabrina’s stare in the back of her mind, but the psychic refused to give a reason for her sudden peak of interest. 

Bill smacked his tongue against his gum, enjoying his third or fourth cup of tea. At this point, J was sure he had enough caffeine in him to stay up all night. Might be mandatory for scientists of his caliber. “Well, in recent history, there has been a similar case of a giant Pokemon in Kanto. Three giant Pokemon, to be accurate.” 

J raised an eyebrow. “Care to elaborate?” 

“Of course, Miss Hunter. Does the name ‘Pokemopolis’ tell you anything?” 

J paused. “Someone was extremely uncreative regarding his utopia vision?” 

Bill grinned, and Sabrina actually seemed to giggle at J’s joke. 

“That is a good idea, but no, I’m afraid, what we are dealing here with is the generic name given to an ancient civilization by historians who just didn’t know any better. The estimated site lies somewhere west of Pallet Town in Kanto’s Southwest. A few colleagues of mine were working on it years ago. They were having trouble, since there was no progress in sight. They had several artifacts and documents at their hands, and even accurate translations, but they were unable to identify the meaning behind. At least, until an accident occurred, which involved two fellow gym leaders- Brock Harrison from Pewter and Misty Waterflower from Cerulean, and a young boy from Pallet Town.” 

Sabrina and J glanced at each other. 

“Ash Ketchum.” They replied in unison. 

Bill nodded. “Remarkable boy, isn’t he? Is there one major event he has not been involved in?” 

J sighed. “Well, so far, he has not set foot into Saffron, despite this being the perfect opportunity for him to show his heroism again, but given that I last met him in Snowpoint, it might be a bit too much of a stretch to actually wish for him to appear here.” 

Sabrina nodded. As much as she had Ash to thank for, that boy attracted danger like a magnet, and, Arceus knew, she had enough of that right now. 

Bill sighed. “Well, anyways…the details are a bit sketchy, since part of the team investigating Pokemopolis was hypnotized at the time of the incident, what could be gathered from them was that two giant Pokemon- or spirits therefrom, we are not sure on that, appeared, once certain criteria were met regarding old artifacts. They- a Gengar and an Alakazam, fought a battle. Theory has it that they were battling for the affection of the villagers, but we can only conclude that from relicts. Either way, they were threatening to destroy the nearby village of Pallet, but, thankfully, could be stopped by a giant Jigglypuff which, too, emerged from an old artifact once certain criteria were met. They disappeared back into the artifacts and since then, we have not been able to revive them.” He paused. “Not that we have- or _should_ be keen on that.” 

J nodded. One gigantic Pokemon destroying cities was bad enough. Four of them were just overkill enough that she would contemplate moving back to Sinnoh. 

Bill took another sip of his tea. “Of course, we have to see, while there are parallels, there are also grave differences. The three revived Pokemon were not only gigantic, but they were less physical on some level. One might conclude that this might have something to do with their typing- they _were_ psychic and ghost types, after all- I’m fairly sure Miss Winter here would be able to elaborate on this much more extensively than I can, surely, but then we have to factor in the Jigglypuff, which is only spiritual in marginal levels. The whole matter is very complicated.” 

J leaned back. “Excuse me if I’m not up to date, but…wasn’t it recently discovered that Jigglypuff is actually a half-fairy type?” She paused. “Something that your dunderhead of a Pokemon professor had not found out despite the species being native to Kanto?” 

Sabrina politely interrupted her by coughing. “Seeing as how he keeps forgetting his own grandson’s name, I would not count on his general intelligence, Jean.” 

“Point taken.” 

Bill laughed. “Good old Professor Oak. Ever as committed. But yes, your inquiry is totally correct, Miss Hunter! Jigglpuff is now classified as a Normal/Fairy type.” 

“Which is effective against Dragons.” Sabrina leaned back on the couch, chin in palm of her hand, as she appeared to be deep in thought. 

Bill grinned. “I see you’re following my trail of thought, Miss Winter. Although I must say, as alluring as the idea of awakening the Jigglypuff is, I am skeptical of its actual feasibility.” He stood up. “Try as we might, I am unsure if Pewter Museum will allow us to study the artifacts.” 

J rolled her shoulders. “And that the fate of another city is at stake will not impress them?” 

“No, I’m afraid not. After all, there’s the possibility that we damage one of the precious artifacts.” 

“Oh, I’m fairly sure, compared to the minuscule damage done to Saffron, that would a devastating loss for the whole world.” J groaned, massaging her temples. “Can’t the league deal with it on their own? I mean, what are these G-Men for, other than signing autograph books of panty-dropping teenage fangirls?” She turned to Sabrina, hoping her to be the nearest source of information regarding that matter. 

The look the psychic gave her was grave in more than one regard. “The G-Men have been contacted. In fact, they had been contacted very early into the crisis, back when the Dragonite first appeared. So far, they have yet to show their faces.” She leaned back. “I hope it has nothing to do with their leader being a member of the dragon clan…” 

“I swear, if your boss is that biased, I might as well start kicking his ass. Still have my ship ready, and, may Arceus have mercy on me, I am fully willing to pick up a fight with a champion!” 

J had intended to boost morals with that, not to make Sabrina blush, actually. 

“For me?” 

“Eh…” 

She also hadn’t intended to make herself blush, certainly. And she couldn’t even blame high blood pressure. 

Bill laughed. “My ladies, you are lovely, indeed.” 

The scientist paused then. “If it is actually of deeper concern to you, you can contact Lance via vidphone from here, too. The connection is password protected and should be tap-proof. Not that I can guarantee it, but it is, in all regards, better than the usual connection.” 

J was just about to decline. She had absolutely no interest in contacting the league personally, not when she was still on their hit-list by all accounts, when she heard a fairly familiar ring tone. 

This time, she was prepared, and looked expectantly at her friend. 

Sabrina blinked. “This is Lance.” Wordlessly, she stood up, and linked her mobile phone to Bill’s own vidphone. 

The greeting was professional and short. “Good to see you alive, Sabrina.” Lance bit his upper lip. “I am sorry to have to command you around so harshly, but I will have to request you to re-enter Saffron immediately. It seems that, despite their best efforts, two of my agents were actually caught by Team Rocket.” 

J raised an eyebrow. By now, she had seen that the league wasn’t as competent as they claimed to be, but that really took the cake. 

Sabrina furrowed her own brows. “Which agents did you send, Lance?” 

The man rolled his shoulders uncomfortably. “You know them, Will and Karen.” 

“Why them? I thought you had type specialists enrolled for this case…” 

J wasn’t so sure if Sabrina actually spoke about Lance himself there, or possibly an Ice- or Fairy-type leader, but she was sure at least there was none of the latter in Kanto, given that the new type hadn’t even reached mainstream media here, and was sometimes still thought to be an elaborate hoax planted by the mischievous professors of Kalos. 

Again, the champion seemed to be embarrassed to have to answer the question. “I wasn’t able to contact the Dragon Elders, if you are actually talking about them. And as for myself, I’m…otherwise occupied, so to say. I’d like to join the fight for Saffron, but it seems as if you’ll have to stall for the moment. Once you get Will and Karen out of the Rocket prison, things should take a turn for the better for all of us.” 

Sabrina still didn’t seem to be convinced. “I already infiltrated the Rocket base, Lance. I am afraid I cannot teleport in as planned. They will have brought reinforcements that will make it near impossible for me to use my powers.” 

Lance nodded. “I was aware of that, Sabrina. But given that we are out of other options, this seems like the best action we can take. I put my faith in you.” And he cut off the call abruptly. 

J leaned back. She still felt uncomfortably cold in that nightgown. What wouldn’t she do to get her gear back! Hopefully, they could take a stopover at her ship before storming the Rocket headquarters. 

Bill stood up, taking the tablet with the remaining cookies and the teapot. “I take it that you two will be busy, then? I wish you the best of lucks, and hope that you succeed. Mew knows that it would be better for Kanto if you manage to rescue the two elites, and defeat the Dragonite.” 

Sabrina seemed to be still caught in deep thought. J was halfway through the exit before the psychic followed her, and promptly hit the door on her way out. 

“Sorry, I was not paying attention”, she apologized, rubbing the bridge of her nose as she continued to stare at her phone. 

J shrugged it off. “I had the feeling you weren’t used to doors, with all that teleporting around.” The hunter stopped, surprised at the fact that she had actually managed to joke around. She paused again. “Is there something the matter?” 

Sabrina stayed silent for a long time, before sighing. “I am unsure….if Will and Karen have already been captured…they were, after all, two of the most powerful G-Men. I am afraid that this is spinning out of control.” And worse, out of her own control, too. 

J stopped as well. What the psychic said was true. If Team Rocket had gotten powerful enough that they could capture Elite Four trainers, what chance did they have? She didn’t like to undersell herself, of course, but she was, all things considered, just a single person with wide array of weapons. Weapons that were designed for her occupation, and that was, capturing and stealing Pokemon. Not so much winning criminal wars. These, she had kept out of for the bigger part of her life, and for good reason, too. Criminal wars and the competition between legality and criminality had, in the end, been what had cost her best friend her life. There were other things factored in, of course, like naivety and brashness, but if it hadn’t been for the eternal war of Team Rocket against society, Miya would still…Miya would still… 

J sighed. “So what? We still gotta try. It’s your city that’s under attack, and your parents and co-workers that are captured. We cannot give up, just because the odds are against us.” 

Sabrina glanced up at her, before betraying the smallest of all smiles possible, and grabbing her hand. 

And damned would J be if she was actually stupid enough to continue lying to herself and say she did not enjoy holding hands with the younger woman. 

~*~Scene Chance~*~

Miles to the West, a man in his late thirties rubbed his clean shaved chin and paced around the dark, mostly empty office that belonged to the league champion. Biting the inside of his cheek, he grabbed the phone on the desk, ignorant of the blanket shifting underneath and the muffled sounds coming from it. The man dialed a number unknown to the league, and waited until he heard the familiar sound of confirmation. 

“Boss?” He asked, his voice creaky and uneven. “She’s coming…” 

~*~Scene Chance~*~

Actually, Sabrina confirmed to J’s wish and teleported them to the southern outskirts of Saffron first. The range she could teleport to diminishing greatly over the past hours had been a factor counting in as well. It also, sadly, established their fears that Team Rocket had reacted to the previous break-in. 

J basically ripped the doors out of their hinges as she stormed her own ship, an accomplishment since the doors were automatic, and was ready to punch the nearest henchmen into the wall, and throttle the next one. Just as she had expected them to, the men were slacking off again, this time, competing in a sack race against each other. 

“One more game, and it’s me who’s racing to rip your sacks off you, understood?! Get me a replacement gun, replacement goggles, replace everything that I’ve lost over the course of the past hours, and fast! I want everything to be lying in front of my quarters within the next ten minutes, or else it’s your bowels which will be spread out in front of you. “ 

She turned around, ready to rip the ridiculous nightgown off her skin when she noticed that the psychic was still following her. 

“Eh…” J stopped. All things considered, she should _not_ feel uncomfortable undressing in front of the gym leader anymore, but that was underestimating the actual fear she had of letting herself become involved with another human being again. 

The last- and first time, if she were honest, it had just destroyed too much within her as that she would permit herself any commitment. 

“I am sorry.” Without any further comment, Sabrina walked out of the quarters, but only as far as she could while staying within J’s earshot. 

“Any plan?” The hunter asked. In general, her plans weren’t as elaborate as she liked them to be. Storm in, mow down anything that stood in her way, grab the goodies and get out. That was, usually, her plan. And given that it worked nine times out of ten, as long as a special boy from Pallet was not involved, she saw no need to change anything about it. 

Somehow, she had the feeling this would not work with Team Rocket. 

The psychic sighed deeply. “Team Rocket is and has always been interested in Silph. That is where they build their headquarters here in Saffron, so it stands to be believed that this is where they’ll be keeping their prisoners as well. Saffron has many other shady places Team Rocket could hide in better, but their arrogance actually keeps them from thinking straight in this regard. Silph was where I found you, and I would estimate the level of your hazardousness to be similar to that of the Elite Four. I would, therefore, conclude that they’ll be kept close. Not exactly the same place, as that would be too easy, but close.” 

J put on her new boots. After hours of walking bare-feet, that felt weird, actually. “And where would that be?” 

“The basement. Team Rocket has excavated greater parts of Saffron. One of their underground centers is located beneath Silph, actually.” 

“A strategic masterpiece, if I may say so.” J was impressed. She had not believed the organization to have that kind of foresight anymore. 

“Indeed.” J glanced outside. The psychic was reclined against the wall, arms folded over each other, a Pokeball actually balancing on her shoulder, likely by itself. “I think I would be able to enter the city unrecognized.” She paused. “I did not venture through it as much as I should have during my teenage years, but I still deem my knowledge about the structure of Saffron sufficient enough to find a way underground.” 

“You have an underground?” J asked, winking, before she became aware of the fact that Sabrina might not have seen that. 

Still, the psychic nodded. “We do. Celadon’s network is better developed, but as I said, it should be enough to get us to our destination.” 

J had just finished putting on her cloak when a polite coughing startled her. 

“Hey, no need to be that shy, you can always come in if you like to…” The hunter looked up. “No, not you, you can piss off, actually.” She quickly added when she realized that she was not talking to Sabrina, but her head engineer. 

„Captain? I have good news, and bad news.“ 

“The bad news hopefully being that you’ve decided to spare me the mess and cut through your abdomen by yourself.”The only bad part about this kind of news was that she would have enjoyed going through that act all alone by herself, and not being forced to only watch it from afar. 

The engineer gulped harshly. She knew him better than she should, actually, given that he was the gadget genius that came up with 99% of her weapons, and was always the first to be contacted when there was a replacement to be manufactured, or when she needed something new to fulfill her wishes. To some extent, it paid off hiring intelligent people who knew how to do their job, even if they weren’t as exceptionally gifted as her brother was. 

J paused before she let her henchman answer. Her brother…she wondered if there was a way to get him involved, and constructively. Then again, the most he would likely do was to annoy her to no end, and that wasn’t something she had in mind here. 

“Okay, then, shoot, before I do so myself.” 

Again, the man gulped and tried to fight the liters of spit that had formed around his uvula. “We were able to replace your goggles and your standard weapons. But being that we had to replace your gun just two weeks ago, I’m afraid we were not in the possession of all missing components to rebuild it in such a short amount of time.” 

J gnarled, only to be reminded sharply of the short-comings of her economy by Sabrina, of all people possible. 

“You should have kept a reserve gun.” 

Yes, she would have shown great foresight had she actually ordered a second gun to be build in case her first one was damaged in any way, but back at that time, it seemed inconvenient to spend so much resources on something that worked so fine and seemed so indestructible. In retrospect, it had been sheer arrogance of her, but that could not be helped anymore. 

“I’ll keep that in mind once we do have the resources again…” She snarled at her henchman, not at Sabrina, actually, and thankfully, it worked, as the man before her seemed to shrink to ant size. “How much longer will it take you to gather all materials?” 

The man started to speak, before taking a breath and mentally recounting the hours, as well as doing a calculation of how many hours he could add without losing an equal amount of life years. 

“If I send out every man available right away, we should have all components ready in about five hours. Give seven more hours of construction, and we should have the gun ready in exactly twelve hours.” 

J nodded, slowly. “Fine. Then move your ass and get started. I’ll keep a look at my stopwatch, understood? Twelve hours and one minute, and you can kiss your ass goodbye. Let’s hope you don’t have a tender hip bone.” 

She took a deep breath. Theoretically, she was ready for the big fight now. As ready as she could be, given the circumstances, at least. But why, then, didn’t she feel ready? 

Scene change

On an idyllic farm, located in the Northern outskirts of Pallet Town, a young man wiped away some sweat from his brow, as he let the playful dark type Pokemon named Umbreon jump over the obstacle he had build for it again and again. 

Nodding to himself, Zero took the time the Umbreon needed to complete the course, and then compared the time to that of its mate. “Not bad! You were faster this time! Two full seconds!” He petted the eeveelution, and sighed to himself as he noted how incredible warm it had gotten. “Want to go inside and cool down a bit?” He asked the Pokemon, which eagerly nodded and wagged its tail. “I wonder what the prof is up to…I hope he hasn’t locked himself in the restroom again…” Zero sweatdropped as he remembered the incident where he had to call the lock and key service to get the old man out of the small cabin. Why one would need to lock the toilet up didn’t make any sense to Zero either. 

“I’m back, Mister Oak! Back with good boy Ricky here, who managed to improve his speed by two full seconds!” The Umbreon barked happily and ran up the stairs, to headbutt the Professor in the knee. 

Professor Oak himself was not moving, staring intensely at the computer screen in front of him. 

Zero blinked, slowly walking up the stairs. He did not want to startle the poor man and hence risk a heart attack, but he was curious as to what had captured his whole attention. “Is there something the matter, professor?” 

The senior took a deep breath. “Take a look at this, Fives.” 

Zero glanced at the screen. A Dragonite easily four or five times the normal size of its species was shown in the center focus of the news coverage, wrecking havoc on a city. 

“Nice. Didn’t know they were remaking Pokezilla already.” He squinted. “The special effects suck, though. I think I could have done better with photoshop and a handheld camera!” “

Four, actually, that’s real, live footage.” 

“Oh.” Zero paused. “Sir, my name is Zero, just got to remind you, yes?” 

“Yes, yes, boy, I know, I’m not that senile.” 

And Zero was absolutely not a geek boy that would protest a change of skin color of the original Pokezilla. 

“This looks bad? Is this here, in Kanto?” 

“As a matter of fact, yes. This is Saffron that is in the process of being destroyed, actually.” 

“Oh…” Zero gulped. He also remembered Saffron as being the home city of the gym leader his older sister had fallen in love with, and felt his throat constricting at the awful implications. “Is the gym leader alright?” 

“Miss Winter? Oh, yes, indeed, she is alright. She is trying to come up with a plan to stop the Dragonite. Actually, I was phoned by my dear friend Mister Windows about the situation at hand.” The professor rubbed his chin. “He asked me about an area of archeological excavation right here in Pallet, and requested me to transfer all information I had about the giant spirit Pokemon that threatened to destroy Pallet Town years ago. I think he and Miss Winter were trying to come up with a plan to utilize these Pokemon as weapons against the Dragonite, but I’m afraid you’ll have to tease the details out of himself.” Oak paused. “Oh, and did I tell you that your sister is actually also getting involved in the affair? She was with Miss Winter when she and Jill were working on their plan.” 

Zero pouted. “That sounds like Jean, alright. Always rushing in as soon as loved ones get attacked.” He snickered. Sometimes, he had to keep secrets from her just to work unbothered. In retrospect, having his sister’s help might have boded well for him the last time he had tried to make contact with Giratina. “Think they’re gonna succeed?” To be honest, Zero had no doubt that his sister would succeed, whatever her plan was right now. She was just too stubborn to fail. Professor Oak, though, sighed and crossed his arms. “I tried to contact the league to see how the current status of progress is, but my calls were left unanswered. I’m afraid the situation is so out of hand that the league cannot answer me right now…after all, Lance should be on his way already, being a born expert on Dragon types, naturally.” 

Zero blinked. “Lance Grey, and his G-Men, I suppose?” 

“Indeed, Three, the G-Men are supposed to handle these situations. Yet they have not shown themselves yet.” 

Zero shrugged. “Maybe that’s the plan? Keep the Rockets under the delusion that they’re safe and all, and attack when they’re at their weakest? I have seen that done before...” 

Professor Oak sighed again. “My dear boy, I’m a studied man, not a war enthusiast. I know next to nothing about strategies and tactics. You’ll have to ask Lance himself as to what his plan is, actually.” 

Zero paused. He had no intention of contacting the boss of the league, given that his own relationship with the law of the state was shaky in many regards. 

But he had absolutely every right and intention to see that he would get in contact with his sister, and see to it that he was actually of help for her for once. 

Likely despite her loudest insistence that he was nothing but a pimple on her butt. 

Scene Change

As has already been established several times, there are many more comfortable places to spend hours at than a prison cell, no matter how one had entered the compartment. It was as sparsely furnished as a poor student’s living quarter, as cold as an igloo, and it was boring as hell to be forced to do nothing but twirl one’s thumbs. 

“Karen…” Will called out for the approximately seventh time that minute. “I’m bored.” He declared, likely for the eighth time that minute. 

And just like the past seven times, Karen’s answer was to throw her nail file his direction, without actually hitting him. Given that she was leaning against the wall opposite of him, upside down, with her legs and hip reclined against the wall, so as to expose everything that was hiding under her skirt and much more that was certainly _not_ hiding there, the lack of accuracy on her part was a given. 

“Just a few more hours, Will.” Karen answered, the nail file flying back into her open hands after a simple gesture from Will. “Just a few more hours, and we’ll have our fun.” And with that, she began filing her teeth, drawing an annoyed yawn from her partner and boyfriend. 

Scene Change

“Never thought I would see the underground that deserted. Normally, people are stacked here…” 

Actually, J’s statement did not come from experience, but from mere assumption. Saffron was the capital, after all, and J felt confident in thinking of the city’s tube system to be normally equal to a humane sardine can, with all the associated smells and noises. 

But today, the long, neon-enlightened halls were eerily deserted, and the two women walking along the train rails were accompanied by no one but their own thoughts. 

And that would have been much easier to bear for J, who was unsettled at the atmosphere more than she wanted to admit, if her partner hadn’t been occupying herself entirely by staring at her phone intensely. Which was silly in J’s mind, since she felt certain in assuming that the connection was next to nonexistent several meters under the surface of the earth. 

“The architects of the underground were well aware of this problem, and installed wifi routers all over the underground. The connection here is as splendid as in every single coffee house I have ever been too.” Sabrina looked up, staring J directly into the face. The hunter shifted uncomfortably. Feeling as if she was buried prematurely, the sight of Sabrina’s unnatural purple eyes made her queasy. “And as for the desertedness of the city…according to news reports, Saffron has all but been evacuated.” The psychic shrugged. “I can only assume that the city fathers were clever enough to find a way to organize the escape of nine million inhabitants, however they did that.” She paused, rubbing her brow. “Actually, now that I think about it…last time I spoke to the mayor, he was planning on using a newly constructed teleporter system for emergency cases such as the one at hand. We had our students work together with the engineers of Silph for that to work out.” 

“Given that Silph is now in Rocket’s hands, is that a good or a bad thing?” 

Sabrina’s answer was as cryptically as her whole persona. “We’ll have to find out.” 

They passed another underground section, and Sabrina stopped, staring at an unimposing circle-shaped hole on the left side of the tube. It might have a well been a ventilation outlet, but from the smell coming from it, J knew very well what it was instead. 

“Oh, come, really? Sneaking through the sewers? I thought we were over these clichés!” She complained, crossing arms and refusing to walk any further. 

Sabrina pursed her lips. “This is not the public sewer system. This is actually the private waste disposal system of Silph.” 

“Illegal?” 

“Very much so. Ubi non accusator, ibi non iudex. And given how Saffron is extremely happy about having Silph at all, nothing is going to change.” 

“Good to know the next time I’m using public transportation systems. Gonna check if I’m up to date on my vaccinations…and, now that I think about it, maybe your sewers will be your next big problem, after we’ve taken care of the Dragonite. Don’t want mutant Squirtles marauding the streets.” 

Sabrina smirked at J’s remark, before lifting herself up and crawling through the pipe. She hated to admit how less useful she was without her powers, and how physically unfit she could be at times, especially at dire times like this when she was needed to be at her fullest capacity. She glanced ahead. She had long since let Haunter out of his Pokeball to clear the scene before them, but again, the dark field the many, many nocturne underlings of Team Rocket emitted threw a wrench into her works. She was hardly able to detect the ghost Pokemon floating silently through the concrete above and ahead of them, and could much less actually converse with him via telepathy, which made it near impossible to give him commands from afar. She trusted Haunter to solve difficult situations by himself alright, but the ghost type sometimes had a different idea of what ‘solving’ actually meant, and more often than not went for unconventional ways that yielded the same result, but hds unexpected, and sometimes, irritating side effects. 

Such as now, when he found it appropriate not only to hypnotize the guards that were patrolling the secret tunnels, but make them make out in front of the gym leader and the criminal. 

That both Rocket guards were male didn’t help the situation, either… 

J clicked her tongue. “Thinking your Haunter wants to tell us something?” 

Sabrina turned around. “No, unless he actually inspired you…” And with that, she kicked in the lattice beneath her and jumped down. 

J paused, shrugged and then turned to the ghost, who compliantly floated next to her. “Cannot say I did not try, honey.” 

Once she had safely landed in a surprising well constructed hallway, she felt her eyes shifting upwards again. “Think they’ll have security cameras?” 

“They do, in fact. I had Haunter knock the cameras out.” 

J wasn’t sure whether a blob of bubble gum plastered over the camera lens was a suitable strategy for disabling the cameras for long, but then again, what they were about to do would alert the Rockets sooner or later anyway, so it wouldn’t hurt to have a bit fun on the way inside, right? 

“So, which way do we need to go right now?” 

“If I had any say in it, straight to hell!” 

Apparently, J and Sabrina were not the only ones wanting to have some fun inside. 

“Oh, dear…it’s the genki girl again.” 

Domino puffed up her cheeks, and put her hands to her hips. “Nice to see you too, old hag! How rude of you to just leave without saying goodbye first!” 

“Well, I had not much say in that, now, had I? Given that the freak here teleported me out before I knew it…” J tried not to draw any attention to the fact that she was reaching for one of her knives. Without her cannon, she was surely not at an advantage anymore, but that did not mean that she was totally defenseless, either. After all, there had been a time in her life where she had to work with much less technology, and much simpler weaponry. 

Domino actually glanced at J’s side, where the gym leader was standing, composure much less eager to fight than J was showing it. The hunter supposed that without her powers, the psychic was reluctant to engage in combat, but then again, she never had shown any outright enthusiasm for any activity, really, unless it came to the various ways in which she continually embarrassed J and made the hunter question her self-imposed chastity. “How nice of the gym leader of the city daring to show her face, too. We were waiting for you, actually, and you left us waiting for a long, long time. What gave, Sabrina? Too scared that we would beat up your ass? Or as uncaring as ever for the lives of your people? Thought you would be more concerned and become more involved once we had your family and friends, but then, I suppose you don’t form emotional attachments close enough to actually have something called friends.” 

J snarled. “Well, she is actually emotionally developed enough to have a partner, you misfit bunch of mannequin props!” 

There were times were it was right to be pissed off at being falsely accused of being in a relationship that only existed in the dreams of one participant, and in the nightmares of the other. 

And there were times were it felt so incredibly right to lie. 

Domino raised her eyebrow, and Sabrina mimicked her gesture, before the psychic lost all remainders of posture she had, and clung to J’s left, now gun-less arm like a second skin. 

“I…best not to question this.” 

“Yes…” J endorsed her, before shaking off Sabrina, who didn’t seem to be disheartened by this in the slightest. 

Domino coughed. “Now, I’m curious as ever as to what you two clowns are actually doing here. Breaking into the headquarters the first time was a surprise, I admit, but by now, the joke is getting old. What do you want here, other than to annoy us to no end?” She pointed upwards at one of the smudged cameras. “And other than to waste delicious bubble gum?” 

“Well, we were informed that you had captured two league agents that were trying to get the situation here in Saffron back under control, and given how I’m somehow more in league with the, well, league than I have ever been in my whole career, I feel it is my right to say that we would like to have them back, unharmed, in perfect condition and sane, it it’s possible.” 

“Sane? Karen?” 

J shrugged. “As sane as they were before, if that’s any help.” 

Domino wiggled her forefinger. “I’m afraid that’s not possible.” 

J snorted. Had it been possible, she would have abandoned all hope for Team Rocket already and plastered her job advertisements all over the place, for the slight chance that Team Rocket at least possessed a more capable cook than her own team. 

“So what are you going to do about it, little girl? What will you do that will stop us from waltzing right into the prisons, again, I might add, and free the two of them?” 

J wouldn’t outright admit it, but when Domino, instead of answering her, threw one of her electric rings, the hunter felt more delighted than she should have been. 

She had known the old Team Rocket. From personal experience, despite being never a member. Being best friends with one of their elite members, though, that helped in understanding what the organization had once been about, and how they had once bulldozed their way to the top percentage of Kanto’s criminal associations. Seeing Domino, this girl that was all hair and make-up and no backbone, had made her feel angry in a way she could not describe, yes, could hardly comprehend herself. The closest she could actually come up to an explanation was that it made her feel as if, if this was truly the best Team Rocket had to offer nowadays, then Miya’s death had truly been for the naught. 

So maybe, what she was fighting for when she started to deflect Domino’s overgrown balancing pole of a tulip, first with her upper arm, and when that turned out to be a painful experience, with her knives, was not the freedom of the two elite trainers. Maybe J was fighting for the honor of acquaintances long since gone, who could not protest the misuse of their codices themselves anymore. She had to be careful and keep on dodging the electrical powered quoits that Domino produced from seemingly nowhere, instead of using more traditional weapons for fighting. 

While dodging a particularly nasty blow from the side, which Domino enhanced by poking her in the back with her pole, J saw the psychic sprinting past them. Even though J was slightly irritated at being left behind, she supposed, given the situation, it was a wise move. The psychic had used the distraction to clear the field for herself, and by the time Domino had noticed that something was up, Sabrina was already almost out of the room. 

“Hey, come ba-!” 

“As if!” J used the handle of one of her wider combat knives and hit Domino straight in the back of her head with it, as the younger girl was foolish enough to turn around to address the psychic, who was ever as unlikely to even listen to her. 

“And now what?” She called, finding that the psychic was way faster than she had expected her to be. J had trouble keeping up with her, and since Sabrina wasn’t giving away coordinates, she had to focus on not losing sight of her. 

“To the prison tract!” She heard from somewhere around the corner. The contrast between the corridors was striking. Some were intensively well-lit, had clean, sterile white tiling or the floor was even covered with a soft, orange carpet. Other parts looked as if they came straight out of the middle ages, bare stone walls that dragged on into black infinity. 

And they were heading straight into one of those. 

“That’s what happens when you build your headquarter underneath a business trading center…” Sabrina actually commented, once J had managed to reach her. 

“Well, yeah, the styles clash a bit, I must admit…” J looked around. It was almost pitch dark now. She wondered if that meant the hall to be free of security cameras. No, she had not forgotten that night vision devices existed, but she had her doubts about Team Rockets willingness to use them. 

Obviously, she herself was in need of such an upgrade for her goggles as she found herself bumping into her partner, having momentarily forgotten that the corridor had to end at some point. 

“We’re here…” Sabrina announced. The prison tract was separated from the rest of the underground headquarters by a large iron door, looking heavy enough to withstand all attacks they could bring out. That didn’t seem to faze the gym leader, though. 

“Leave it to me…” She mumbled, fiddling with the locks of the door for a few moments. The sparse lightning in the hall made it hard for J to see what she was actually doing, a problem which was soon solved by the door creaking open, letting rays of bright, snow-white neon light flood the hallway and momentarily blind J. 

“Nice trick. Didn’t know that being a psychic made you a perfect lock-picker as well.” 

“It doesn’t.” Sabrina turned around and held up the bunch of keys she had been hiding. To J’s unasked question, she almost grinned. “I stole these from Domino while she was occupied by your fight. She does not seem to possess a particular good sense of attention.” 

J raised an eyebrow. It was anti-climactic, surely, but it got the job done, anyway. 

They were led into the same prison room she had been kept in several hours ago. J shuddered, wondering if her old clothes and equipments were stored somewhere here, but that was unlikely. Whatever Team Rocket wanted, it surely couldn’t be other prisoners welcoming the resources they would be given here if that were the case. 

From the outside, the rooms looked even smaller than from the inside. It was the plainest of all prison tracts possible, a long hallway with around half a dozen rooms attached, each equipped with two cells on opposing sides of the room and a small gangway in-between. 

“There we are…” Sabrina whispered, peeking into the room farthest to the right. J paused. So far, this seemed ridiculously easy. Now, she wasn’t a particularly paranoid person, but even for this new, fairly incompetent Team Rocket, she would have expected them trying to stonewall them a bit more effectively. 

She glanced inside. The two elite trainers didn’t seem to be particularly distressed or alerted, nor did they seem to take notice of the jangling that came from their prison door. In fact, they looked unnaturally relaxed, with Karen having entangled her legs in-between the prison bars in a stunning circus-like act, while Will was busy filing his nails. They did not look one bit like the average prisoners J had seen throughout her life, something which confused her to a great deal. 

“You think getting out will be as easy as getting in?” She asked the psychic, who was already busy fiddling with the keys again. It surprised J to see that this Domino girl seemingly carried every single important key with her when she should have known about the danger of them being stolen during such a risky fight, and this alerted her danger sense all the more. 

Sabrina turned around, just as the lock clicked open. “There is a chance, but as long as we can, we should go with the flow.” 

J rolled her eyes. This did not sound like a plan she would like, but truthfully, this was exactly what they were doing right now. 

“Finally! We thought you would never come!” The first thing they were greeted with once they entered the room was Will’s obnoxious gnarl. “You took your jolly long time!” He stood up, stretching his back. Meanwhile, Karen didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get up. Instead, she look a painfully long minute to pull her skirt in place, which, in her case, meant that she pulled it down until all in covered was her belly button. The heels of her shoes were wrapped around the bars, making her look as if she was waiting for a gynecologist’s appointment, and not for her liberation. J felt the blood not only raise to her cheeks, but nearly boil as she forced her gaze to linger on things that were as unappealing as possible, like the gully opening in the middle of the room, or the leaking water pipes that cornered every wall. 

Sabrina, possessing the ability to ignore the allurements of every single women save for J, shushed Karen away from the lock, so that she could finally give the two elite trainers their freedom back. If J hadn’t known it any better, she would have said that something n Sabrina’s behavior actually disappointed Karen. It remained unclear if that was her plain disinterest in what was not hiding beneath the dark trainer’s skirt or the fact that Sabrina willingly freed them. Either option had the potential of upsetting J even more, but by now, she supposed she had no choice but to get along with a plan that existed only on a superficial terrain. In fact, this non-existing plan was a disgrace even to the more straight-forward ones of “ambushing trainer- get Pokemon” that J usually relied on. 

For the third time that day, a door sprang open and for the second time, a prison was cracked. Will casually strolled out of the small room as if it wasn’t much more than a closet he had accidently locked himself in, while Karen was still busy sorting the many layers of her skirt back into place. Which meant, as high up as she could without resorting to binding it. 

“Now, tell me, as I’m deadly curious…how did you get captured by Team Rocket? Really, you two are elite trainers, you’re not supposed to be incompetent.” J glanced at Sabrina. She knew that Sinnoh’s league sometimes proved itself to be dangerously stupid in regards to their national criminal organization, but so far, the worst that had happened was the kidnapping of some meteorites, and she had the feeling that once shit hit the fan, even her champion would move her lazy ass and try to protect what was basically owned by her and her alone. 

Sadly, so far, the same couldn’t be said about Kanto. She would undersell herself if she said that it had been a bad idea to employ her to stop Lawrence, in the end. There was nothing she could criticize about Lance’s decision there without sounding like a hypocrite. But this was trouble on a vastly different scale. This was not dealing with a single maniac anymore that liked to hide his action figure collection in his father’s basement. This was trouble on a national scale, and the two experts trained, qualified and send to deal with it had let themselves be caught on the very first occasion. That sounded nothing but fishy. 

Will sighed, as he played around with his powers for a while. J fidgeted away when he teleported one of his Pokeballs in. Unlike her, he had been left in the possession of his greatest weapons, and that, J reasoned, meant that something was absolutely not right here. 

“You know, actually…” 

The Ghostbuster’s theme chose this moment to interrupt the tense atmosphere. Every single person in the room was too stunned to move for a moment, except, of course, for the owner of the mobile phone herself, who clicked it open and answered in a most conversational tone unfit for the actual situation. 

“Yes?” 

She paused again, evidently surprised at what was said to her from the other side of the line, judging by her wide open eyes. 

J wasn’t sure if Sabrina had turned on the speakers on her phone on purpose, or if she had done the next best thing that came to mind in her shock, but either way, it turned out to be a good choice. 

Normally, hearing Professor Oak would send a shiver down J’s spine, and not because of awe, but because she mourned the ten minutes of her life lost, spend hearing to the old man repeating the same story several times until finally, he had gathered himself and his brain cells well enough to deliver the punch line. But as it appeared, in dire situations, even the professor was able to keep it together long enough to explain the essentials. 

“Mrs. Winter we are in great trouble. I just received news from Indigo that the league has been infiltrated. An imposter has made it to Lance’s office and incapacitated him. Koga and Bruno were just now able to free Lance. It seems as if Team Rocket has planned ahead and send you back to Saffron with the purpose in mind to capture you!” 

J would have rolled her eyes if that didn’t seem so inappropriate now. 

“Good to know, professor. Would have been better to know before we were already inside.” Not that it was his fault, not at all, of course. But it felt good lashing out at someone, and from all the individuals present, the professor was the only one who couldn’t defend himself and snap her neck in the process. 

The professor went on, seemingly having overheard J. “We also have information gathered that leads towards the existence of traitors within the league as well. We must assume that they are in active contact with Team Rocket, but we do not know their identities, and…” The phone clicked shut. 

“But we do.” J added lamely. 

It was the moment Will had let free his signature Xatu, and Karen had decided to go for her Absol, as if to make fun of the excellent teamwork they had displayed just weeks ago. J felt mocked by life. She was a self-declared criminal, now in league with the good guys, and here she was, threatened by good guys who had decided to side with the bad guys. Somewhere along the line, there had to be a joke, but J couldn’t put her finger on it. 

Either way, it was irony at its best. 

“So sorry that it has to end this way, but…” 

“Cut the words, boy.” J snarled, earning a scorning by Will, who still refused to be mistaken for anything below twenty-something by someone who, in his eyes, had one foot in the grave already. 

And whose second foot he was intend on placing just in there, too. 

“I would take every bet that you are not one bit sorry.” 

Will shrugged. “Honestly, that _is_ the truth, but you cannot complain about me trying to be nice.” 

“Trying to be nice, my ass. You’re just repeating clichés. That way, you’ll never ascend to the level of true mastership at villainess, boy.” 

The psychic shrugged again. “Hey, who tells you that this is what we’re in for?” 

“Well, if you’re as stupid as you look like, this is going to be the moment where you hold your evil monologue, display every single of your childhood miseries, like not getting that Ponyta your dad had promised for your seventh Christmas, and then you’ll explain in painful detail every single weak point of your plan to us so that we can, surprisingly, defeat you once you’ve left us alone with your devices of death. Isn’t this how it works in the movies?” 

It went against J’s own code of honor to even watch these movies, but she had a crew of henchmen that needed blunt entertainment, and it was better than spending the nights alone, playing Tetris on her laptop. 

“Nice try, but no. We are intent on destroying you.” Will grinned. “After all, it will arouse no suspicion if a well-known criminal is killed in Team Rocket’s headquarters during a siege, right? Underworld wars, feuds between illegal competitors, nothing new, right? And, well, if anything will prove how serious Team Rocket has become in the past years, it will be if they manage to kill one of the most dangerous gym leaders of their region, right?” 

J rolled her eyes. Given the situation, it was likelier that any respectable person would laugh themselves to death, seeing freaks such as Domino within the ranks of elite Rockets. 

“So, I am actually sorry that we’ll have to cut this chit-chat short, but there is work for us to do, aside from snuffing out these pathetic lives of yours.” He nodded to his Xatu. “Hypnosis!” 

J supposed that this was the lazy-man’s technique. Putting them to sleep, so that they could not defend themselves while their throats were slit. Lazy, yet efficient, and therefore, stylish in a way. She almost would have congratulated Will on his plan if it didn’t go against her survival instincts. 

Given that she had no protection against psychic attacks, she was surprised to see herself not affected by it. It took her a moment to realize that the psychic on her side of the law had intercepted the attack. 

J had, in all of her life, seen quite the few occasions of a human fighting a Pokemon. Mostly, it was fighting trainers sparring with their Pokemon. Miya, who herself had never owned Pokemon, had nevertheless found it all too funny to practice kickboxing with their trainer’s Nockchan, earning her many a bruises over the years. 

But what J had certainly never seen before, and not believed to ever witness, was a human psychic going up against a psychic Pokemon. And an Elite trainer’s Pokemon at that. 

She wasn’t sure of the odds, but even with all the faith she put in Sabrina- had to, honestly, she was still sure of this to be an unfair fight. 

“What?” Will was more than surprised to see his Pokemon struggling for a moment to keep the Hypnosis up. “How do…oh, sneaky!” He exclaimed, gnarling with his teeth. “Karen, would you mind…” 

Karen’s answer was a guttural mewing that made J think of barfing Meowth. 

The Absol jumped forward, its horn glowing in an intensive, dark pink, before lashing out at the air in-between Xatu and J. J could only begin to guess what the purpose of this attack was, before Sabrina pulled out a Pokeball at the last second and recalled Haunter, who might otherwise have been cut in half. 

Not that this should have bothered the ghost, being incorporeal at all, but J supposed that even for something not in the possession of a body, getting separate from your other half must feel awkward. 

“Sneaky of your Haunter to intercept the hypnotic waves of Xatu with his own. I see why Lance was thinking about promoting you.” Will folded his hands. “Too sad he decided to employ me, in the end.” 

J had to agree with him. Even she, who could not be bothered to care much about her henchmen, seeing as how they were replaceable as paper tissues, liked to keep track of their resumes, if only to make sure of their loyalty. It wouldn’t do her any, _any_ good to have traitors or spies lurking around her ship. 

Not that the league hadn’t tried this before. But the last spy they had send had end up being Magikarp food with the additional accessory of a concrete brick tied to his feed. That was, she admitted, original Rocket’s style, but she had liked the idea. There were some things these imbeciles got right, after all. 

“Seriously, enlighten me before you decapitate me. Why did you decide to join Team Rocket? Or were you members before you became league trainers?” J wondered if she was honestly trying to stall here, or just morbidly, in every sense of the word, curious as to how rotten the league had truly gotten over the past years. Not that she had ever been a fan of authorities, her family had swiftly beaten that notion out of here, but so far, some things in life had been easy and clear. She was the bad girl, the league was made out of good guys. 

And now, the world had apparently done a three-sixty for her enjoyment. 

“Karen and me? We were approached by Team Rocket as soon as we were on the list of potential candidates for the next league trainers. I think they were trying to recruit every potential” 

Sabrina crossed her arms crossed over each other, apparently disagreeing with him. 

“Oh, come on, Sabrina, besides everyone with a sane mind not daring to hire you for anything, it was obvious you’d never be chosen, not with your past.” 

Other individuals, J mused, would be offended, but Sabrina just kept an unnatural cool, collected look. 

“I think it’s superfluous for me to say, pot calling the kettle back here.” 

Will sighed. “I think, right now, it’s a waste of you to open your mouth anyway, as the only thing that will come from it soon anymore is your croak of death and a lot of bugs.” He grinned. “If that wasn’t what was hiding beneath these rotten teeth of yours, anyway.” 

J had done some vastly foolish things in her life, she would not deny that. Anyone who said they had never done anything so utterly stupid they deserved to be spanked was a bloody liar, and therefore, J felt confident in saying that while her list was short, it existed, and just today, another piece of idiocy was added to it, as she went to punch the psychic right afterwards. 

She really should have known. Given that her experience with people of the supernatural kind had increased by more than 200% in the past weeks (given that it had lingered at 0% ever since her birth, that was, maybe, not that amazing), she really should have known how foolish of an idea it was. 

But as with everything else in life, a brain was most likely to shut down spontaneously whenever it was needed the most, and so, J found herself sprinting forwards with her right arm extended, right hand clenched to a fist, and not much later, she collided with something hard, underneath something soft, that was Will’s cheek. 

Because it had not only been her brain that had encountered a 404 error, but also Will’s, mainly because he had not expected anyone to be as stupid as to attack him physically. To tell the truth, even Sabrina was momentarily wondering if J had consciously tried to use an illogical strategy, or if she had rather lost possession of her sanity. 

It seemed to be a short-lived victory, since while Will himself was staggering with confusion, Karen was snarling angrily, and with her, her Absol was, and having caught the ire of either of them was bad news, so being in the crossfire of two hell-bent individuals searching for revenge was positively horrendous. 

J was just as aware of the ill-lucked position she was in, and given that she had no means at her disposal right now to successfully defend herself, aside from her knives, she ducked out of the way of Karen’s attack- which might have been a tackle, but who was to tell with humans badly imitating Pokemon, anyways, and held her knife in such a perfectly positioned way- consciously, she might say, accidently, others might, that the Absol received a deep cut into its chest area when it tried to scratch her back. The resulting ruckus was again, enough for the two women to flee the scene. 

J sighed. This was definitely not what she had had in mind for this rescue mission. Thinking back, it would have been the wiser decision to leave the two elites to rot in their cage for all time, but given the circumstances, it was unlikely that they wouldn’t have been able to free themselves, and everything, from Lance’s call to their break-in, was nothing but a superfluous adventure coordinated to hunt them into Team Rocket’s open arms now. 

“Where to now?” She asked her unwilling guide. Sabrina had watched her surprise attack with interest, unwilling to join the fight herself as long as the dark trainer was present. There was the slight chance she would also be unwilling to fight Will, but J hoped that, as weird as the gym leader sometimes was, she wouldn’t put honor before life. In case, anyways, that a stupid rule of honor existed among psychics. 

“Up”, was the single-worded answer she got, as Sabrina led the way. A good thing, for J had lost orientation pretty much after they had left the prison tract. She couldn’t even tell for sure if this was the part of the building they had been to before, for all the walls looked the same, and every corner just seemed to take them to the previous hallway. If this was another of Team Rocket’s strategies to confuse intruders, J had to congratulate them on a job for once well done. If not, then she was seriously questioning the navigation skills of the average Rocket member itself. To find your destination here, a map had to be provided! Or a satnav! Or at least a compass… 

And suddenly, they were in front of stairs. And not just some stairs. These stairs were not the kind you found in basements, small, wooden, creaking with every step, daring you to put too much trust in them before they ruthlessly gave away underneath your tipsy feet and letting you fall to your demise, or at least towards a broken ankle and bruised hips. 

No, these were eloquent, wide, stone stairs, with bright, golden rails, slightly bend as if to give them a less artificial look, leading upwards towards something that, for J’s slightly agitated heart, looked like descent into heaven. Well, it was not heaven per se, but it was leading to the lobby of Silph Co., and therefore to something that many a business men would fervently defend as their own personal heaven. At least as long as the stock prices were going up. 

“The Rocket basement is directly connected to the lobby?” 

“Yes.” Sabrina answered, as if this was the least suspicious thing in the world. 

“Okay, I just…I mean…why out here in the open?” It was an unwritten rule that as a villain, you always had to have an escape route ready, for the occasion that you needed to get away as fast as possible. That much made sense, of course. But putting that emergency door right in front of the public eye seemed to be a bit too risky… 

“Well, they do have to get out somehow, don’t they?” 

J stopped. “You mean this is the _only_ exit?” She was just about to fall into another inner monologue about bemoaning the fate of the organization that had once looked to be so promising when she noticed that her mobile phone went off. She glanced down, finding that she had twenty unread messages and at least forty unanswered calls. 

“Didn’t you say the underground had perfect connection?” She asked, glaring at Sabrina. 

The psychic shrugged. “It does. Maybe your service provider is just not sophisticated enough…” 

J paused, and decided that, before she would go into a fight with Sabrina over technology terms she would only loose because of lack of experience, she would rather take a look at who had been trying to get into contact her so frantically. And she hoped, she hoped so badly that it was a member of her crew, so that she had someone to beat into a bloody pulp later. 

To her greatest dismay, it was someone else whose nose she would have loved to smash in, but the probability of her getting that chance was considerably smaller. 

“Little brother, what in Arceus’ name is that urgent that you need to make my poor old phone boil over with exhaustion?!” 

“Well, if you had listened to me and bought yourself a new one last year, this would not have happened, dear sister…” 

J snarled. Had it been possible to transfer the evil eye over the telephone, her brother would now be cursed for all eternity. And beyond. Because J was just that good at cursing others. “Brother, we’re in a tight situation here, I do not have time for your mindless berating, you technophile nerd, so tell me what you absolutely have to and then shut up, so I don’t have to gnaw your tongue off through the line!” When, oh when had she let him save her number into his own phone? She must have either been totally wasted that night, or Zero had been daring enough to spy the numbers out of her phone without telling her. She couldn’t see herself being that willingly foolish. 

Zero sighed. “Well, if you would actually listen to me, you’d know that it is the precise tight situation that you two are in that I have come to know about.” 

“Fine, and now you want to wish us luck, or what?” She could go without that, really. Having been wished good luck by Zero was as good as having broken a mirror, really. 

“No, sister. I want to help you, actually.” 

J paused. There were quite the few things she wanted to tell Zero now, none of them nice things, but she supposed that they could do well with a bit of a help, so she let him continue uninterrupted. “According to the sat signal, you’re standing in the lobby of Silph Co.” 

“Correct”, J still felt the need to add, even though it burned her skin off to hear Zero being right about something. 

“I tried to look into the Silph computers to see if I could disable to security system for you, but found that Team Rocket had already taken precautions and changed all the passwords from the last time I had hacked into their computers.” 

J had no time to decide what she wanted to be surprised about first. The fact that the Rockets had actually some working security system? Or the fact that her brother had already hacked into Silph’s computers, which had proven to be unhackable for her own team last winter, when she had tried to steal the newest Porygon prototypes. 

“Well, yeah, given that Professor Oak’s equipment is not the best, I decided to contact your ship, and ask them if they could help me out with their computers.” 

J frowned. “And they agreed?” 

“Yes, of course.” 

“Remind me to hire a new crew afterwards. Along with a janitor. A good one. I’ll need it after that bloodbath.” 

There might have been giggling at the other end of the line, J couldn’t be so sure. In her mind, it was gurgling after someone had slit Zero’s throat, after all. “Together, we managed to establish a better connection with the main servers.” There was more giggling, and if this hadn’t sounded so extremely important in her mind, she would have hung up on him right away. “Turns out that they’ve used the new Porygon types to secure their intranet. Not bad for a company like Silph, eh? Using their own product, automatic promotion. Well, anyways, thanks to me, we managed to catch some of these Porygon and reprogrammed them. I have now free access to every single device in the Silph building that is connected to the intranet. Every computer, every security camera, every electric door, every coffee machine…” He paused. “And apparently, every toilet as well, but do not ask me as to why they felt the need to put wifi chips into them.” 

“Probably so that they can update their status even while taking a shit when they’ve actually forgotten their smartphones…that’s all nice, Zero, but what’s in for us?” 

She could hear him inhaling sharply. “What’s in for _you_? Sister, are you _that_ moronic?” 

The only reason Zero got away with that was because long-range murder by throttling had not been invented yet. 

At least not by non-psychics, and for all the different things J was, she was surely no psychic. 

“No, all stupidity piling up in the family’s gene pool ended up being wasted on you and Law-Law. I got the only thing left and that was, thankfully, the IQ points.” 

Zero might have been moaning with exasperation, or else fighting for his life in a lethal battle with the telephone cable, J wasn’t sure which scenario was more desirable in her mind. “It means, sister dear, that I can help you out from afar. No matter what information you need, or which place you have to navigate to, I can get you there. See? Every important door in this place- and there are a lot of important doors in Silph’s headquarters, I am sure Sabrina can confirm, is now open to you!” 

J cradled her cheek in her hand, desperate for some actual, useful intelligence, and not the far-away, out-of-reality knowledge her brother claimed to possess. “Sure, because we want to take an exclusive tour of the Silph building. What help is that for us, Zero, when we have a rampant Dragonite outside and no means to stop it?” 

The snickering at the other end of the line made her want to bite through something, preferable her brother’s throat and her phone, in that order. “Do not worry, Jean. I am taking care of that as well, as we speak. I’ve already contact the league on behalf of Professor Oak and Bill Hatch. We will be trying to get the artifacts you’ve been talking about from Pewter Museum, and I’ll see if we can get to revive them. From what I gathered, the Cerulean gym leader was there the last time the Pokemon awoke, so we might get her into the game as well.” 

To J’s left, Sabrina muttered something that strangely sounded like irritation at another gym leader being involved. 

J, though, worried about something else. “I would be careful about notifying the league. Apparently, they cannot even keep their own staff under control.” Since Zero did not blast immediately about how he had a solution for this situation, J concluded that this was news to him. She would have smiled with glee if not for the general urgency. “Two of their elites are traitors, matter of fact. They’re involved with Team Rocket.” 

Again, the line was quiet. “I know.” 

J clenched her wrist. Was her brother secretly a psychic as well, or had he installed bugs in her phone? 

“Sister, I was just on line with Professor Oak, we know about the betrayal. Hell, I think the whole world knows, by now, with the way the reporters have been swarming the league. I think the ratio of actual league agents to Team Rocket agents to paparazzi is something like 2-1-4 at Indigo, right now.” He paused. “They’re hoping to gather Lance soon so he can get the situation under control.” 

J was fairly sure that the sarcastic snickering from her side came from Sabrina. 

“Wonderful”, the hunter exclaimed, “It seems as if we’re fairly behind on news…” 

“Given that we are in the middle of the happenings and can hardly observe them from the outside, this is to be expected.” 

J rolled her eyes at the smart-ass psychic, before turning to the no more pleasant job of listening to her brother. 

“So you’re taking care of the artifacts, the cavalry is taking care of Lance…what is our job, then?” 

“Well, from what I hear, you have hostages to rescue?” 

They had, and J felt momentarily very bad for forgetting about Sabrina’s family and friends. 

“Plus, sources say that the head-honcho himself, Giovanni, is still in the building. If you feel up to the challenge, dear sister, you might try to challenge him personally!” 

J stared at her phone as if there was the slightest chance it would change form and turn into a car, or something even more unlikely. “You expect me, the famous criminal, to take onto another criminal? Without my iconic weapon? Brother, are you out of your mind? Wait, don’t answer that one, you have never rightly been in your mind, so why do I ask…” 

She glanced at her wristband whilst remembering that her calcification gun was still up for reconstruction. Seven more hours if her henchmen were actually on time, and for the sake of her freshly polished floor and the fact that the stench of blood and bowels was so hard to get out of furniture, she hoped they were ready by then. 

Even though she could not see him, J knew her brother to be shrugging. “Would be the perfect ending, the highlight of your career, before you settle down, marry and have a family with your girlfriend, right? I’d love to see your name in the headlines of the papers for a positive reason for a change…” 

“And I would love to see your head rolled into paper like a stinky mackerel, brother, but sadly, we cannot always have what we want.” But no matter how much she scolded her brother, somehow, the allurement of taking down Giovanni was too good to be true. Her rivalry with him was deep-seated, but so far, she had never seen a real, existing chance of dishing it out with him, so she had never even bothered thinking about the possibility, and the ways of achieving it. 

J took a breath, clenching her wrist. Giovanni was, in a way, just as guilty as Lawrence was. It might not have been his enthusiasm and persuasiveness, that was entirely Lawrence’s part. But Giovanni had been the financial power behind, the head of the project, in a way. 

Not to mention, he later became Miya’s boss, the same boss who never bothered to send a rescue party. 

Zero must have noticed her quietness, and the sneaky, intelligent bastard that he was, he must have figured out the reason for her sudden moodiness as well. “See, sister, this might be your chance to avenge her. This might be your chance to put an end to it all.” 

J sighed. An end…she doubted it would ever come to an end. 

But it was worth the chance, wasn’t it? 

“Okay, brother. Tell me where that bastard sits on his lazy ass throne, and I’ll make sure to kick him so hard into it that he’ll outshine the moon and the sun.” 

Zero would have said something akin to the line ‘That’s my sister!’ if that wasn’t entirely unnecessary. His sister was the great Hunter J, after all. 

Scene Change

Zero had barely hanged up on J when he felt another idea spark in his mind. It was risky, very much so. And hell, he had no idea if he would be able to go through with it. He might be able to construct the right equipment out of what he had at hand, no doubt, but that was the smallest out of the several problems his idea confronted him with. 

He took a deep breath. 

“Professor Oak?” He asked, waiting for the slightly senile man to walk up the stairs. “Can you put Sinnoh’s champion Cynthia on line? There’s something I need to ask of her…” 

Time to face his own demons. 

Scene Change

In the end, freeing the psychics had been one of the easiest tasks of today for J, besides escaping from the Rocket prison herself, which she had nearly no hand in aside from grabbing Sabrina’s in order to be teleported out. 

The prisoners were kept nowhere close to where Will and Karen had been, further cementing the notion that the two elite trainers had been hostages of a very different kind. 

J kept out of the situation as good as she could, not intent on meeting again with the father of the woman she was smitten with so soon, given that she felt she had made a pretty bad first impression of herself. 

So all that she saw was the psychics interacting out of the corner of her eye. She wasn’t particularly surprised by the rather chill way the family talked to each other. Others might have wondered why there were no tearful hugs or screams of joy at reunion, but she had seen her fair share of dysfunctional families- having grown up in one herself, that this did not astonish her anymore. If anything, she was only taken aback by the fact that Sabrina’s father decided to approach her himself shortly after the rest of the psychics had already taken their leave, being directed towards the lobby by their leader. 

“So I heard from Sabrina that you have decided to support her on the mission of freeing the city?” 

J slowly detached herself from the wall. That was what she had been trying to tell him the whole time, right? She sighed. Being psychic obviously did not make you fast of the mind. 

„So?“ She asked back, maybe a bit harsher than she had intended. 

There was a moment of silence between the two of them, which the older psychic seemed to use to scan her psychically, much to J’s dismay. Hidden beneath that coconut skull of hers were a lot of gruesome secrets and sights, which she was not keen on sharing. 

“She told me that she trusts you, and I trust Sabrina’s judgment on the matter. But as her father, I advise you not to ever attempt or do anything that might hurt her feelings. This is not a threat directed towards Sabrina’s well-being. This is something I say for the sake of your own safety. ” The stare he gave her was unnerving and particularly alarming, given that his eyes seemed to glow even in the fluorescent light of the lobby neon tubes. 

“And last, I want to wish you good luck.” 

He teleported out without letting J get in a word edgewise. The hunter sighed. Not she had wanted to argue with her imaginary father-in-law, but if there was one thing the discussion had brought to light, it was that the whole family was not right in the mind. 

She turned around, finding that only the gym leader was left. 

“Ready for some action?” J asked, even if her eagerness was only there to cover for actual anxiety. She was not the bright knight in shining armor, fighting for peace, equality and law. She was merely the avenger who had woken up and fallen out of bed to find himself in the middle of chaos.


	3. Chapter 3

“Well, who would have known that he decided to take the president’s suite entirely for himself?” J asked no one in particular. Mainly because she didn’t feel like her question merited any answer. It was obvious that all men leading criminal organizations were megalomaniacal to some extent. 

She explicitly excluded herself there. She was a woman, a business woman, and absolutely not insane. 

At least she hadn’t been insane for the past years. Now, accompanied by the psychic, she was beginning to doubt that. 

They had been sneaking up floor after floor, occasionally taking the lift whenever they felt like it and the cabin in question was free of any and all Rockets. They did not dread the confrontation, but it was better to save energy for the real boss fight. 

J growled at herself for even daring to think in a way that was more befitting of her nerdy brother. 

Who, she again had to admit with a deep frown, made himself useful by directing them across hallways which were empty of enemies and security cameras, and thus contributed to their safety. 

“Do you think he’s been expecting us?” 

J turned around, surprised. During the whole walk upstairs, Sabrina hadn’t so much as uttered a single word. 

And now that she had, J had no suitable answer ready for her partner in crime, so all she could do was to stammer and fiddle with the words, glancing around. Had Giovanni been expecting them? Had he expected her to intervene? Or Sabrina? It made sense that the gym leader of the city, being the most prominent and powerful chess piece on the board would make herself known to any threat upsetting the order, right? Had Giovanni prepared for a direct confrontation, did he know what he had gotten himself into? 

Or had insanity claimed his brain already, melting what little puddle of goo was there to form coherent thoughts? 

For a moment, J hesitated. There was nothing to stop her if she wanted to retreat now. No one could force her to fight alongside the good guys, and really, she had every reason to back out now. 

Every reason, but one. One incident that made her shrug, taking one last, reassuring glance at the psychic and pushing the doors open. 

Well, trying to, since Giovanni actually surrounded himself with sliding gates. 

Villains- and J certainly considered herself one, often tried to invoke their own personal style on their headquarters. Voluntarily or involuntarily, they presented a noble stylishness, a grimy dirtiness, or a flashy shadiness to whatever building they dwelled in. And this was especially omnipresent in their own bureau. J had long since opted for clinical cleanliness and modern technology. Giovanni, obviously, opted for useless, overt grandeur. 

It reminded her of Law-Law, and not in a good way. Nothing that reminded her of Law-Law could be good, and Giovanni’s connection with her past made the similarity all the worse. 

“Good evening, my ladies.” Giovanni greeted them, not facing them but the giant glass wall on the opposite side of the room, hands linked behind his back. He was dressed in a murky, dark green. Better than the flashy warm colors J remembered him to favor. Really, that neon orange alone seemed to be the main reason for every and all eye cancer cases in the team. 

“I was hoping to meet you in person today. You really did everything in your power to catch my attention, didn’t you?” 

J crossed her arms. “Yes, because we were just desperate for it. Trying to take on your elite agents obviously was not enough.” 

Giovanni laughed, but it didn’t sound like a healthy laugh. It either sounded like the laugh of someone who had been chain-smoking for the better part of his life, or someone who had laughed his throat raw for reasons not further specified. And since J knew Giovanni to be close to morbidly health-obsessed, at least regarding cigarettes- alcohol was a totally different topic, she supposed something must have kept him amused all day long. 

She wasn’t sure if she really wanted to know what the essence behind his amusement was. 

“Oh, you gave them quite some trouble, I have noticed. Poor Domino was devastated to find her precious Absol hurt, you know? She spent a whole hour in the ER of the Pokemon Center, cursing you the whole time.” 

J suppressed the urge to grin. Making someone curse her name to the gods. Another achievement she could cross off her bucket list. 

Giovanni hand waved his own comment, disregarding of Domino’s apparent mental pain. “A minor disruption, all in all. The Pokemon was fit by the end of the hour, and I expect Domino to take her revenge once she arrives, which she should in given time.” 

J had expected enemies to swarm them sooner or later, and still, she was irritated. Not so much at the danger that Domino proposed to them- it was a factor, sure, but not one that had her worried. She had hoped that Giovanni would keep this personal, not involving team members that had nothing to do with the underlying conflict. 

Which, of course, proposed the notion that Giovanni had any idea what this really was about. 

“That is, if you are still alive by then, which is something I wouldn’t bet my property on.” 

Giovanni turned around. J noted with a mischievous smirk that the man’s hair had started graying, and it almost looked as if he was starting to get a bald circle on top of his head as well. Given that his mom had stayed a true and undyed black-haired well into her sixties, this seemed to be really bad luck, or else the consequence of unfortunate male exclusive inheritance. 

"So, what? Are you going to fight us, or not?” J asked, snarling, one hand already on Pokeball. 

Giovanni took a deep breath. “I am going to beat you, but not with Pokemon. That seems too laborious, if you ask me. There are many more efficient ways to extinguish your will to fight, right, Jean?” 

J froze. She wasn’t surprised that he knew her real name- in all honesty, he had every reason to know it, but it did bother her that he dared to use it. 

Giovanni turned to Sabrina, who, unlike the hunter herself, seemed to be entirely unbothered by the scene. Though, given that this was Sabrina’s base mode, this was hardly surprising. Still, J thought she could detect something like disgust in the psychic’s features, which only hardened once Giovanni approached her. 

“And Sabrina dear…given your past, I must say I’m surprised you decided to take actions against us. I thought we went along just fine, hm? Turning a blind eye to each other’s misbehavior, never agitating the police to what we did…what happened that you’re suddenly so eager to give us trouble?” 

“Things change…” Sabrina answered simply, but J noted that, again, she kept a Pokeball balanced on the back of her hand, a quite impressive telekinetic trick, given that her hand was hanging loosely and vertically at her side. Even without the quiet laughter that erupted from the Pokebal, J would have known the inhabitant to be the pesky ghost Pokemon that strangely had taken a favourite spot in Sabrina’s roster. 

Giovanni did not seem to be satisfied with that answer- if he had actually been foolish enough to assume that Sabrina would give him a full answer. 

Sighing, he turned to J. “In a way, I must admit, Sabrina, that you’re right. For example, Jean…your taste in women certainly has changed.” He glanced at the psychic, then back at J. “After sweet Miyamoto, I would have never guessed that you ended up with a freak. That sounds highly…suspicious.” 

J growled. “It is still my choice who I spend my time with, and it is not your place to question it. It was never your place to question it, Giovanni.” 

The older man retreated, but it was with a smile, and such, not really meaningful. “I never questioned your…infatuation with Miyamoto.” He paused and closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, they were glistening with something that even J could only describe as pure vindictiveness. “I only destroyed it.” 

He wasn’t even exaggerating. 

Scene Change- Flashback

There are many things little girls love to do in their pastime. Some girls give tea parties to their teddy bears and love to spill water with dandelion leaves in them all over their cotton fur. Others have dolls which they like to dress up and carry around in miniature buggies. Some take this play-pretend a step too far, but this is not the concern we need to surround ourselves with in case of the two girls, neither of them into the double-digits yet, that were laying on the warm sand of Sunyshore City, letting the sun bake their backsides. 

One girl, hair almost as purple as an eggplants surface, was writing into her soft-cover diary, pink glitter gel pen swinging around in swirly motions as she recalled every single action of her vacation so far, including every lick of ice cream and every drop of sunscreen she had let run over her pale fingers. Big plastic ear rings, way too big for a girl her age, tilted back and forth with every move of her head. 

The other girl, more or less successfully hiding behind marram grass, had short silvery hair and no adornment to speak of. Grouchily, she sat in the grass, knees pressed together and towards her chest, arms looped around them. Emptily, she stared ahead at the sea, not a spur of the joy the other girl emitted visible in her face. 

Understandable, since the little grumpy face had just lost her mother. 

Despite the lack of physical distance separating them, the girls did not know each other yet. It was a particular strike of fate that the slightly taller girl with the green eyes sighed, deciding to stop writing that moment and stood up, following a speck in the sky above her that she identified as some kind of bird Pokemon before turning around and, inevitable, spotting the other girl squatting on the dune above her. 

And of course, it was an inevitable turn of fate that the purple-haired girl, dressed in a cream-colored jumper and moss-green skirt, decided to approach the stranger, childish innocence still fresh on her mind in a time where Team Rocket was nothing but an electrical impulse surging through someone’s brain. 

“Hey! You there!” Clumsily, Miyamoto tried to climb up towards the girl, but found that the sand was too dry and loose to let her have any sort of grip on it. She very nearly tumbled backwards, before the other girl, Jean, noticed her and automatically grabbed her hand, pulling her towards her. Both girls tripped then into the weeds and sand, and soon, both had jumped back onto their feet and started to accuse the other of loutishness, and as the cause for the unfortunate consequence that was the dirtiness of their clothes. 

Being little girls, the anger lasted all of the three minutes before curiosity took over and an inborn fondness for members of the same gender that was not yet tainted by any sexual fragrance. 

“Who are you?” The taller girl asked, tiny hands pushed against her hips as she tried to look intimidating. 

“Jean. Jean Hunter.” The other girl answered, pout visible on her round little face, as she pushed back sweaty grey hair that threatened to hinder her vision. “And you?” 

“Miyamoto Morgan.” The girl said with a smirk. 

“Weird name.” 

“Yours isn’t better.” 

Jean grinned. “What are you doing here?” 

“I’m on vacation with my parents.” Miyamoto kicked up some sand with her bright red slippers, careful not to make it obvious that she was trying to hit Jean in the face. “And you?” 

“I live here.” She paused. “With my brothers and my dad.” 

Miyamoto paused, having taken note of the way Jean’s voice fell once she added the second statement. “No mom?” 

“No, she died…” 

“Oh, sorry.” Miyamoto suppressed the reflex to kick up more sand and instead pointed back towards her blanket, decorated with various dolls, vanity cases for kids her age, bottles of lemonade and cookies. “Do you want to see my glitter pen collection? I have a whole dozen of them, even a gold and a silver one!” 

Glitter pens were not the main point of interest in Jean’s life, but she supposed anything was better right now than continuing to sulk atop the beach. “Sure.” 

Miyamoto couldn’t stay for long. In fact, this first meeting lasted only two days, before she went on to visit other cities in Sinnoh with her parents. And still, it was life-changing, because neither of them managed to forget the strange beach acquaintance they had made. 

Sometimes, this was how friendships started. 

Scene Change

Given that, after their first encounter, Jean and Miyamoto had next to no contact, it was extraordinarily surprising that the next time they actually met, not only did they recognize each other, but they also instantly felt connected. 

Maybe it had something to do with the fact that they had the same goal in mind when they broke into the breeding center, but then, they should have viewed each other as rivals, and not instantly as companions. 

For Jean, it was barely the beginning of her career. She, in the middle of the problematic teenage years, but given her family, her field of work was as acceptable as working in a bakery, had not yet managed to give herself a reputation of being ruthless and successful. She didn’t even have any remarkable weapons on her yet, let alone a crew to do the dirty work for her. She was merely a freelancing thief right now, who took on whatever job she could find to make a living on her own, not forced to beg for support from her deranged family. 

And Miyamoto was not yet the elite agent of Team Rocket that she would later be known for, even though she was already high up in the ranks and close to the boss and thus, all things considered, way more successful than Jean could claim. 

Going by sheer power then, Miyamoto should have been the one carrying away victory easily. Instead, what she carried away was Jean, but in a sense quite derived from what this usually implied… 

Glass was cut, and a circle of it carefully taken out from the rest of the pane. A black-clad figure let the light cone of her torch flicker across the storage room, before she squeezed herself through the hole and jumped onto the floor, silently, only dispersed dust her eyewitness. Giving her entrance a last glance, Miyamoto sprinted across the room, avoiding the security cameras on her way like the expert she was. What good were they, when they didn’t cover every single centimeter of the room they were installed at, and let one sleek woman like her walk around freely? Miyamoto suppressed a devilish grin, and began fiddled with the lock of the door. A quiet click announced her success, and she opened the door… 

…only to find herself standing face to face with Jean, who had been in the process of entering the storage room as this was where the material she was supposed to look for was located. 

A comically long moment went by before both young women recognized each other. 

“Glitter pen girl…” 

“The orphan…” Miyamoto countered, grinning. Jean didn’t bother correcting her, because all things considered, she was an orphan of sorts. It wasn’t as if her family cared about her anymore. 

“What are you looking for?” Jean asked, sneering. She actually hoped that Miyamoto was looking for the breeding equipment she had been tasked to steal her, the tanks with the frozen Pokemon sperm to be exact, so that this mission, which had been mostly boring so far, would finally spice up a bit. 

Miyamoto nodded over Jean’s shoulder, into the saleroom. “Lil bird whispered to me that there’s a male champion breeding Meowth in that room, and my boss wants it for her son.” 

Jean grinned. “Good for you. I just want its sperm. So I suppose even though we’re after the same thing, essentially, we won’t get into each other’s way.” 

Miyamoto crossed her arms. “Good for me? Good for you, little girl. I would have you begging for your life on the floor in a matter of seconds.” 

“Oh, really? How? Tickle me to death?” Jean glanced over Miyamoto again. The girl, frustratingly still taller than her, seemed to be weaponless, but looks could be deceiving, as Jean herself knew. No one would have expected her to carry throwing knifes and shuriken on her, would they? 

Miyamoto shrugged. “I know more fighting techniques than they have official names for, so I suppose yes, I could tickle you to death, and you wouldn’t even realize what I’m doing until your heart stops beating.” 

Jean smirked. She liked this girl, for some reasons, and her toughness was only one of them. “So what are we supposed to do now? Fight each other to death seems pointless to me, since that would only interfere with our missions.” 

“Hm…” Miyamoto glanced around the room. “What do you think about raiding the whole shop? Take away everything that seems like it could be useful or sold for something useful?” She pointed over her shoulder into the storage room. “For safety reasons, I would start with the security cameras. Pretty sure Madame Boss has some use for them, after all.” 

Jean grinned. “Sounds like a plan, girl.” 

It was certainly not the most conventional way to refresh a friendship forged in one’s youth, but by the end of their raid, both Jean ad Miyamoto were standing outside of the shop, arms and bags full with money, equipments and anything that seemed like a good catch, including the shop keeper’s telephone and his VCR, and his wide array of explicit cassettes that would surely make up for a nice girls’ night. 

Scene Change

After that night, nothing was ever the same. Jean had known about Team Rocket before. Given that the team was starting to climb to its peak point of its regency of fear and terror, it was no surprise. Neither was it surprising that she eyed them with suspicion, either out of jealousy or out of fear of ending up unemployed if the team took on all missions that usually ended up in her mailbox. 

Now that she had the perfect contact person with Miyamoto, Jean decided to take a look at this criminal organization herself. Sadly, it happened at a time of uproar within her own family as well, and so, she was forced to drag her brothers along with her. In Zero’s case, it was more of a babysitting trip than anything, while her older brother, who was already an eccentric par excellence, had commercial contacts in mind. 

“Really, Law-Law, how many more coats and skulls do you need to stuff your room with?” Jean asked, dragging along with Zero hanging at her ankles. Other, normal boys had posters of rock stars, cars or scantily clad models in their room, Lawrence had the full-grown skull of a Tauros hanging over his bed in case he needed something to jerk off to. 

“Dear sister mine, it is not a matter of quantity, but of quality. The rarer, the better. And really, who can brag about owning the skeleton of a two-faced, hermaphroditic Nidoran?” 

“Only the insane, obviously…” Jean muttered, wondering if there was enough time for her to accidently loose her way and wander off into the halls. She could still dump Zero into the next waste bin, where the pre-schooler would likely still find a way to cut himself out of the aluminum container by using only tooth sticks and a bottle cap. Sometimes, it was frightening to have two brothers that were as intelligent as they were crazy. 

Because, while she still had the mere advantage of being taller and stronger than Zero by sheer virtue of being much older than him, she could simply not ditch Law-Law that easily, and was forced to follow him along, as he bragged over different types of cartilage found in Ryhorn skeletons and the value of ancient west-Kanton clay vases. 

It was only for the best, then, that Jean got put out of her misery by sweet Miyamoto herself, their contact person. 

“Need some reason to run away?” She asked, hands clasping J’s shoulders from behind. It was a rare thing for J to be surprised, and it was oh so much rarer for the cause to be another human being that lived to see that next day, for Miya had a magic around her that either made her invisible to J’s mere mortal eye, or soothed her soul whenever she dared to look into Miya’s eyes. Or both. Maybe the girl was no girl, but a fae out of the fairytales, and she was merely posing as a human to get some fun out of the dominant species on earth. 

“Yes…” J groaned, not even bothering to hide her displeasure from her brothers. It was futile to hide it from them, since they knew very well that she was irritated having to breath the same air they did for longer than five minutes. In fact, it was their proclaimed goal to make their sister as grumpy as possible, and given J’s wide arsenal of negative social interactions, they had to go a long way before they reached rock-bottom with her. 

Miya grinned. It was no blissful, heavenly grinning, but one that spoke of hell and mischief. No one, least J, should ever say that her friend was an innocent angel sent from above. If anything, she had crash-landed after someone had cut off her wings, and she had flipped them off while weaseling her way back onto her feet. Miya could not be a mere mortal human, J thought, back then. 

“Ever babysitted someone so important he gets fed with golden spoons?” She asked, sneering. 

Wordlessly, J pointed to her brothers. “Law-Law would get fussy if he didn’t get his Snowpoint albino caviar and Mount Silver dried Kobe Miltank, mixed in with fifty year old Chardonnays. And don’t get me started on his terrible twos…” 

Miya chuckled. “Then you’ll be glad to get to know our future boss…” 

‚Glad‘ wasn’t exactly the word J would have use to describe her feelings when she first met Giovanni. ‘Dread’ sounded more like it. Or ‘abhor’. Or ‘distaste so enormous she’d rather drink gasoline out of a cesspit than shake his hands’. 

A young man in his late teens, it seemed, the size of a gym’s locker strutted out of the room just seconds after Miyamoto had said these words, and took one single look at J, hands still in his pockets. He grunted, all acknowledging he’d spare this scrawny, silver-haired hag and then turned to Lawrence down the hall. 

“And that was…who?” She asked, not sure if it was worth commanding some brain cells to remember his name or existence. 

“Madame’s son, Giovanni, and heir to the team.” 

J turned to Miya, looking her all over as if she’d grown a second head. Not only because she was trying to grasp what kind of direction the team wanted to go with such a bloke as its rightful prodigy, but also because she couldn’t understand how any self-respecting female individual could fawn verbally over him. Then again, all that came to her mind when she saw bare-chested guys was the right kung fu move to disable their movements and dismember them, if possible, in the process. Some part of her should have been wondering why everyone else found Giovanni to be incredible attractive in his early twenties while she didn’t, and how even her brother admitted to be jealous of Giovanni’s biceps while she wasn’t, but J had the amazing ability to be aware of everything and everyone around her except for her very self. 

Not knowing what else to do, she leaned against the wall, Miya casually next to her, chewing bubble gum with a cheery attire and occasionally peeking into the hallway, trying and failing to play with Zero, who had taken the time to upgrade the dust bins to automatic shredders (and sadly, not putting his hands in them to test the function, to J’s dismay). 

“So, Mister Hunter, what is it that you wanted to show the team?” Giovanni asked, J hearing his voice for the first time. Back then, it was not the deep, deep baritone it was later, but rather a hilarious rollercoaster ride between all octaves possible for the human vocal chords, courtesy of puberty. 

Her brother answered while walking away, fully aware that his sister was listening in on them, and so, all information J got from that conversation was that it centered around ancient, prehistoric Pokemon. She sighed, while Miya shrugged and, playfully, took her hands. “No worries, orphan girl! Bet it will take me all of two days to find out what’s the fuss about!” She winked. “No one can resist my charm, you know?” 

J would have denied it to her grave, really, she would have, but to her greatest despair and horror, her younger brother did see her blushing and nodding when Miya uttered these all too honest words, and, of course, Zero was never one to stay silent when he was supposed to shut up, so it was only a matter of time before Lawrence started teasing his younger sister about the bad girl crush of hers. 

And of course, it was only a matter of time before Giovanni himself, Law-Law’s new best buddy, would be informed as well. 

Scene Change

That’s when she had first bet Giovanni, still the ‘brat’ under his mother’s supervision, and already laying bare the seeds for his empire of evil, and his extraordinarily murky character. Where his mother covered essential ruthlessness with business plans, he ripped the surface away to lay bare the bleeding tissue beneath, and then, to spit and rub salt right into the sensitive zones. Where his mother knew that in order to stay successful, she had to keep the agents that were the most useful to her and keep them in a state of mind and body that made it possible for them to give their best, her son burned out all energy and force of will that might have lingered within the shells that were once his most trusted members. All under the disguise of teamwork, all under the name of glory and success. 

Even back then, J had not taken liking to the half-pint teen that was as arrogant as a noble prize winner with bad attitude, and she supposed that had, in the end, marked her final decision of never entering Team Rocket. She wanted to be her own boss. If she made it to the top, then it was her achievement that she could wear like an armor around her chest. If she failed, then it was her duty to eat the shit she had piled up upon herself. But she would never find herself to be forced to abide to anyone’s else’s idiocy. 

And idiocy it was, what likely surged through her older brother’s brain, when he talked to Giovanni himself, and found, as morbid as it was, a fellow soul in him. Both of them driven by total obsession, and, as different as the objects of their satisfaction were, the characteristic itself was a heavy glue, and it made up for all rivalry-like tendency that might have otherwise emerged. 

J was, nowadays, very sure that it had been Lawrence who had brought up the topic of Mew to Miyamoto herself. As gnashing as it was to admit, her brother knew how to wrap people around his little finger, and sometimes, he knew where to start. He knew that sometimes, it was worth the effort smearing honey around the mouths of the younger, smaller fishes of a team before one tried their hands at the shark container. 

Scene Change

“It’s so….glittery…” Miya’s eyes shined as she turned the precious card between her fingers, and rubbed over its smooth surface with glove-clad hands. Lawrence looked so smug J felt the need to polish his teeth until they were as shiny as the card itself, hopefully with sandpaper, until his chin bones were visible. Then, he could smile all day long. 

“Oh, yes, indeed, isn’t it? A holograph, very rare.” Miya gave the card back to him, fingers shaking and admiration so plain visible it wouldn’t have surprised J if she fell to her knees next and started licking Lawrence’s shoelaces. Then, J supposed, she would have to commit double-murder before gouging her eyes out. 

“Where did you get it?” 

“He bought around three thousand cereal packages and ate them over the course of twelve years, why do you ask?” J answered with dry humor. 

Lawrence only made a dismayed face at her, as if she had gotten the year of his birth wrong. “It is from a special edition, dedicated to the lost species of the planet. Mew, as this ancient individual is called, has been erased from existence, sadly, and so, the only left-over we have are depictions old civilizations created, like the replication of this mural relief here. There are several of this kind spread all over Southern America, the supposed habitat of Mew. “ 

“Cool…” Miya said, again glancing over the card. “What does it say? Are these words, even?” 

“Yes, they are.” Lawrence coughed. “But they are not fully deciphered yet…best translation so far would be…little angel or little devil?” 

“Oh, so Mew was depicted as the average younger sibling? Fine.” 

Miya chuckled, while Lawrence frowned. “I do not get what you want to say there, sister.” 

“Of course. You are the oldest sibling. You would never get it, Law-Law.” 

The taller woman started gnawing on her lip. “Would you mind if I show this to Madame Boss, honey? She’s a nut for anything rare as well, and I think the story behind might interest her.” 

J could only roll her eyes. As if a business woman like the leader of Team Rocket would seriously waste her time with child’s toys. 

Obviously, she did, because shortly afterwards, Miya was commanded to a special unit, assigned to find out more about this “Mew”…. 

Scene Change

Lawrence had been the one to take advantage of her own friendship with Miyamoto, to invite her again and again, and slowly, but surely direct the topic of conversation towards harder to get targets. Like her, Miya was a huntress at heart, and like her, she could hardly refuse a challenge. 

And they were not alone in their mission. 

Scene Change

J felt as if she had accidently stumbled into an extraordinarily secret meeting of the super villains that was actually held in Miya’s private quarters and consisted only of wanna-be eccentric Law-Law, her friend Miya and the boss-in-waiting Giovanni. In retrospect, it was obvious to her she should have knocked before entering the room, but she never had bothered before when visiting Miya, had never felt the necessity of announcing her entry. 

After all, she had never seen Miya holding secret meetings with men, and, to be honest, she had been glad about that, even though Miya’s child had already been born at this point, proof that she had at least some kind of sexual relationship. 

“What are you doing here?” Giovanni, the threatening undertone of his voice hidden by the squeaks that accompanied every other word. 

J crossed her arms, unwilling to leave at the untold commando. “I could ask you the same. Weren’t you supposed to be at the gym leader’s convent today?” She grinned. “Too bad your side job as the brat kid of that mothers of yours it taking up so much time…” 

Giovanni growled, and J was sure he hoped to sound like an angry Ursaring, when in all reality, he sounded like a meek Meowth. 

“We are merely discussing Miyamoto’s next mission.” Lawrence answered for the rest of them, holding up a cassette recorder and smiling brightly to himself. “Have you not known what she discovered, recently?” 

“Other than the surprise within Jessie’s dirty diaper, no?” 

Again, Miya chuckled, and J smiled back at her. 

Lawrence sighed, but before he could say anything, Giovanni had snapped the recorder from his hands and pushed the play button. What J then heard, sounded definitely like a wounded Meowth, but, at the same time….a lot softer and cuter, if sounds could carry along this notion. 

“What…is this?” She asked, eyebrow rising. She had better things to do than to listen to Pokemon sound’s, like taking a bath, cutting her toenails or robbing the national bank. 

“This, my dear sister…” Lawrence started. “…is the beginning of an amazing adventure laid bare to our feet.” 

Scene Change

Things had changed fast afterwards. Suddenly, Madame Boss was not Madame Boss anymore. In fact, she wasn’t anything anymore, except for a corpse found at the end of the stairs in her mansion. It was a no brainer to conclude that she had not tripped over her own feet and broke her neck, as the paramedics supposed with a woman her age, but no one within the team was going to question the change of administration. Things went on with a different boss. Maybe not in the best direction, maybe not with the best intentions, but they went on. 

Much to J’s dismay. 

Scene Change

“This is insane, Miya!” 

So she should hardly have been surprised to hear that her friend was issued a tour around the South American Mountains. And not just any area, but the most secluded, far-away area possible. 

Which made sense, given that they were looking for a Pokemon no one had seen in hundreds of years. 

“This is totally, utterly, completely, 100% insane! And I’m not even exaggerating yet!” 

The mission itself, though, made no sense. 

Miya sighed, lazily sweeping over her long hair with her gloved hand. “And what if it is? Sometimes, we have to take the risks. Heck, Jean, all important discoveries were made because either someone was stupid, or because someone was brave.” 

J mulled grumpily. “Didn’t know you were aiming for the first approach, Miya dear.” 

A chuckle answered her. “It’s only stupid if it’s unintentional. The whole expedition group is very sure of what we’re doing. Everyone is right behind the idea. We know we can fail, we’re all aware of that, but we have the willpower to go through with it even if we shall find nothing.” Miya shrugged. “We will come back again and again until we find something of worth. It is not Team Rocket’s style to leave a thing unfinished.” 

J groaned. It was also not Team Rocket’s style to go without a blow, and she feared this was the way this mission would end, too. “You are looking for a myth, Miya. You are looking for something from bedtime stories for kids. A mythical God. Something that may not even exist in anything but the most superficial style.” The hunter crossed her arms and fell onto Miya’s bed. While it felt as if her friend was stagnating, chasing after shadows, she herself was getting more and more influential, and had just recently employed the first engineers to design her a ship. She cursed her older brother for being able to plant such a ridiculous idea into her mind, and part of her understood now why Miya was so smitten by him and his ideals, but another part of her just wanted to kick his ass, and punch sense into Miya again while she was at it. 

“That, Jean…” Miya pointed straight at her face. “We will only know once we’ve been there. Who is to say that Mew is really just a myth? We discover new Pokemon every other day…sure, it’s a rare case for the university professors and their theoretical asses to get off their armchairs and actually take look a at the world outside, but see what happens when they do!” She shrugged. “Omanyte were supposed to be extinct, and now what? Oops, we found a living colony of them? Should we worship them as Gods now, as they apparently should not exist because of some librarian sticking his nose up to high? Who knows, maybe I’ll come back with a pair of fluffy, pink kitties in my arms…you’ll get one, no worrys.” 

“Sorry, not at cat person, but you can give one to Law-Law for his collection, and another one to Zero for him to put it into a microwave and see what happens.” J sighed. “But what about your kid, seriously? Are you going to let her be all on her own for weeks, months, years? Who knows how long you’ll be stuck out there in the jungle…you can’t expect a kiddo like her to get out of that unscathed!” 

Miya’s daughter…J sighed. To this day, and far into the future, she had no idea who Miya had been philandering to end up with a kid in her teenage years. No one in the team had batted an eyelash, and neither had J, because honestly, it had been her friend’s choice to get stuck with a brat, but for all that she herself grimaced at the thought of bringing up a child, she still stuck with her friend and kept a close eye on Jessie whenever Miya was out there, robbing rich people of their valuable goods and their safety. 

Miya shrugged, like the caring, responsible parent she was. “She’ll be okay, she has foster parents, and if they’re tired of her, they can send her to boarding school. She is a clever, stubborn little princess, she will be okay on her own.” Miya smiled. “She’s too much of a momma’s girl, anyway. Time to break her in a bit.” 

“I see you’ve been taking after Giovanni…” J grumbled. But then, she could hardly blame Miya, for if she had been burdened with a kid before even reaching her twenties, she would have taken the next best chance to drop it at a place away from home, too. Considering some family constellations- and she clearly included her own there, too, it was even for the better. Better to leave the kid somewhere she might even find the rare sane person than to bring her up within the team, where her only choice was to buckle under the pressure of always giving everything and more to the Rockets. 

Miya shrugged. “Of course. He’s the boss. Better to swim with the tide than against it, right?” 

J sighed. “He’s not the best idol. Have you seen how he treats others? I mean okay, a little torture in the morning gets one in the mood, for sure, but…” She shrugged. “Getting his agents killed because of tax refunds? I think this is going a bit too far, even for my taste…” 

The Rocket giggled. “That’s the heart and mind of a business man, Jean. He takes after his mother, and if I take after him, I can only become as good as her, no?” 

J pouted. Miya had never told her if she had true ambitions to try to become the boss one day. So far, Giovanni had no biological heir himself, and even though J was sure he’d find dozens of women willing to become his personal surrogate, she was just as sure that he would not accept any blood kin of him at his side. He was just that psychopathic. 

“I just…” J sighed. The truth. The truth was more difficult. “I’m going to miss you.” She whispered. Damn it, she’d have to break a few finger bones this evening to get this mood washed out of her. 

Miya laughed. She really, really laughed out loud. “I know, Jean. I know.” She crept closer to her, until J was sure that their noses were going to touch. “I am going to miss you, too. But no worries. I will return. To you, and to my little sweet Jessie.” She winked. “And then we can be a family.” 

J was pretty sure she was not blushing that moment. Absolutely not. Her mind was way too occupied with withholding the urge to fall all over Miya and kiss her that moment. 

Scene Change

Clearly, J would have preferred for Jessie to become anything, anything but a Rocket, yet there were words and confessions that would not leave her mouth even on death bed, and showing any hint of compassion for a human being was well within the realms of these forbidden qualms. 

And maybe, J mused, Jessie really would have chosen to become a nurse, a secretary, or a Hollywood actress if it hadn’t been for the untimely death of her mother. Though, that was not entirely correct. No one ever knew if Miya had truly died. As the old saying, born from thousands of mystery novels and blockbusters and sequels of niche horror movies went, no one was truly dead until a corpse was found. 

And sometimes, even that was not enough of a proof, for some weird persons liked to get up even after having been stabbed, mauled, shot and cut. 

But J assumed that Miya would have rightly told her if she had been hiding an unusual vampire heritage from her, and after years and years of waiting for her friend to return, J had given up all hope of ever seen these shining eyes and the deep purple hair flicker through her vision again. It had hurt, at first. Pained her so much she had to take it out on somebody, and her henchmen, the few she had had back then, had clearly dreaded Miya’s disappearance in their own way. J, while usually being a very efficient businesswoman, had spend weeks with pitiful attempts at robbing, all the while gnashing teeth and hurling insinuations at everyone around her, unable to be truly consolidated. Not that anyone ever tried. No one wanted to have their arms cut off when trying to hug J from behind. 

No one, but Miya, but Miya was gone, and without her, J felt no need to ever invest any energy of hers in this pesky emotion called love. If there was anything she had learned from this miserable episode, love only made you weak and hindered your job performance. Love kept you from going in at your fullest, love kept you from looking forward, love made you stale and paralyzed you. And love, most importantly, could be lost, and never retrieved. A Pokemon that escaped her grasp at first try could still be located and caught at the second attempt, or third attempt. There was no second chance in love, not when your partner was likely a rotting corpse buried under some avalanche in an Arceus-forsaken Middle Age country. 

If anyone ever said that J had become a bitter old woman over this disaster, then they were totally right. 

And also, likely to be burned to death while being pricked with tooth sticks. 

So, all things considered, could one really hold it against J to bear a grudge the size of Kanto against not only Lawrence, the man who had planted this ridiculous idea in her friend’s mind and urged her on, even when all was already lost, but also against Giovanni, who had thrown money at his team members as if there was no tomorrow, only for them to get buried somewhere he could not be bothered to retrieve their lost bodies and bury them? 

He had certainly never felt the need to cry at someone’s grave, given that he had likely spit on his mother’s, but, she, J, had never had any chance of properly grieving. 

Scene Change

“WHAT DO YOU MEAN, NO CONTACT?!?!” She roared. It had been weeks since she had last visited the Rocket Headquarters, and that with reason. Every time she saw anything embroidered with a red R, she fell into a frenzy that made her murderous. Her henchmen even had to hide the papers from her, in case some unfortunate headlines had been colored. 

Giovanni folded his hands serenely, but J knew this to be a façade. He was as empathic as a ballpoint. “As I said it, no contact. We lost contact with the team four months ago, Miss Hunter. We must, sadly, assume that all have perished, including Miss Morgan.” He opened his hands, but only to take a glass of what was likely brandy. “It is impossible to get the coordinates of their latest location, and therefore, the place of the avalanche. There is no way for us to retrieve the body.” 

J snarled. “No contact my ass! Your scientists just fly in first class with martinis and sandwiches in their hands, and you seriously want to tell me you have no idea where Miya died? Are you stupid?” She paused. “Or do you believe me to be that stupid?” 

Giovanni paused, a pause in which his look and voice turned icy. “No. But I believe I know you to be infatuated with my elite agent, Jean. And this…” he closed his eyes and pushed a button on his desk. “…is something I cannot condone.” 

Scene Change

Giovanni had willingly let Miya walk into her death. 

He had tried to kill J herself. 

But, she supposed with a weak smile…at least she now had a shot at revenge. 

Flashback End


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: Sorry for the extremely long wait. New job ate up all of my time...and so did my other main series "Points". Anyway, here is the last part of Smooth Criminal 3. Enjoy.

Flashback End

J opened her eyes. She felt as if she had lived through a dozen lifetimes at once, recalling everything she and Miya had ever shared. 

Maybe she had, because both Sabrina and Giovanni were staring impatiently at her. 

“Done with recalling your past, Jean?” The Rocket Boss asked, having sat down and putting his head in the palm of his left hand, while absent-mindedly petting his Persian. 

“Yes, yes…” She coughed. “Now where were we?” 

“Well, for starters, I was questioning your continuing qualities as a villain since you seem to have looked for aid by the good guys, and I was wondering when Sabrina had developed a taste for the bad gu…gals…” He corrected himself, his tongue not too sure if what it had just said was, in fact, the correct observation to make. 

The psychic merely continued to glance at him, not bothering with commenting him directly. She just emphasized her connection with J by grabbing that arm of hers again, and being very intent on never letting it go. 

“And according to the ultimate rulebook of cool and epic fights, I think we are now supposed to draw our Pokemon and start a battle of life and death, with as much bystander damage as we can manage, all the while shouting cool orders around and flicking our hair, during which you occasionally let out a thundering laughter of evilness.” 

Giovanni shrugged. “I suppose this is how it’s in the textbook, but, really, did you ever consider that we here might do things a bit differently?” 

“No.” J deadpanned. For all she knew, Team Rocket bathed in clichés. Domino was practically a living, breathing caricature, and for what she had truly been employed, the huntress was not sure of. 

“Whatever…no, I am not going to get my hands dirty. I am impressed that you got so far, but this is where it stops for you. There’s someone here who clearly wants to take revenge, and what kind of evil man would I be to forbid her from taking what is rightfully hers?” 

“Well, you would be yourself, simply…” 

J would have liked to add something, but before she could, Domino had ripped the door open, snarling and throwing mini knives at the hunter and her companion. J sprung to the side, watching as the knives flew by Giovanni, missing him by mere centimeters. He didn’t seem to be fazed at all, but then, being a boss of dozens of freaks, he had likely been teased with bigger threats before, and had outstood them all. Maybe that should have calmed J down, given that they did not have to fight Giovanni personally, but she felt as if she had been conned out of her vengeance. 

The psychic likewise jumped, accidently stepping on the Persian’s tail, earning herself a loud, spiteful hiss in return. Giovanni tutted. “Watch your step. My boy here does not like to have his fur damaged in any way. He can get grumpy. And you do not want to make him grumpy.” 

“Oh, sure, the poor kitty cat needs its fur trimming…” J grabbed one of the knives, which had struck the desk behind her, and hurled it behind her back, barely missing her partner, but, at the same time, also barely missing the normal type Pokemon, which had been in the process of using Sabrina as its scratching post. Both woman and Pokemon flew to opposite sides to avoid getting pierced, and Sabrina used the spare moment given to her to let Haunter free. She must have been planning this ahead, and had secretly informed the ghost type Pokemon about her intentions, for Haunter was gone from view as soon as his Pokeball had been opened, and everyone, J included, was left wondering what the ghost would come up with next. 

Apparently, his first intention was to make himself as insignificant as possible, because even for J, who had had her fair amount of experience regarding the abilities of the nocturnal Pokemon, could not decipher what he was doing right now. Sabrina didn’t seem to be bothered by his apparent laziness, for she smirked a bit. J supposed she should take that as a good thing. In the meantime, she would take care of Domino and her Pokemon. 

And this time, she wouldn’t pull her punches. 

“Come on, baby, let’s wreck some havoc…” She called, before opening the Pokeball containing her Salamence. Drapion might have been a good hitter, and it was definitely good for cutting off every and anything that annoyed her, up and including the heads of their enemies, but if she wanted something destroyed, and not just destroyed in the sense of being damaged, but destroyed as in totally and utterly smashed until nothing but rubble was left, she needed Salamence. There was hardly a thing left standing after a well timed, powerful hyper beam. Crude and definitely over the top, but there were times in life where events just begged you to crush something. Where you just needed to let out all the anger that had build within you over the weeks and months, and the best way to do so was to slam your fist into something that may or may not break it while you released all that bottled up anger. And J, being clever enough to know that punching Giovanni would not give her the satisfaction she needed, and neither would it help her to smash everything within reach with her own hands, as that would take her way too long, instead took the more animalistic approach. 

Besides, she was still very much aware of the fact that Domino had released her Absol, and while she had seen Miya herself strangling a Pokemon with her bare hands and coming out the victor, the hunter was not to keen on having cuts all over her skin. Too many nasty scars that would not leave. 

“Bodyslam!” If there was one thing J was certain about in describing these pesky calamity bringers, it was that they had a pitiful bone structure that made trampling them almost as satisfying as breaking uncooked noodles apart. Of course, the Absol itself was well aware of its primary weakness as well, and so, it hopped away before the bulky Dragon could bury it underneath its wings. Snarling, it lowered its head and the scythe on it began to glow, before the Pokemon suddenly shot upwards and shook its head so that the energy around its appendage was released. 

„Chomp it down, baby!“ J called, teeth pushed against the other row so hard the crunching could rival that of her Dragon’s favourite dark attack. Slowly, the winged Pokemon stepped forward, ripping its mouth apart as it swallowed the dark attack full and unflinching. Shaking its head, it moved forward towards its opponent, eyes glaring downward threateningly. 

“Sword’s Dance!” 

“Sucker Punch!” 

The Absol didn’t even have enough time to set up its stat attack before something came cackling through the ether and punched it so hard that its teeth started rattling. Confused, the Absol tried to locate its folly, but failed. Failed so hard that Haunter had no trouble sending a Shadow Punch after the darkling, well, butt, so that the cougar-like Pokemon yelped and stumbled forwards. 

“Two against one, don’t you think that’s a little bit unfair?” Domino called, retreating only as far as Giovanni seemingly allowed it, all the while holding up her monster of an artificial tulip to have at least one resource of defense to fall upon, should she be forced to confront the two invaders directly. Or flee by breaking the world record in pole vaulting. She had proven herself to be capable of such, for as long as the floor was in a manageable status. 

“Oh really, the Rocket tries to tell me something about fairness! Where has your own moral codex gone, girl? Down the drain, I suppose, or flushed through the toilet, though I suppose that does not make much of a difference here…” J smirked, reminding Domino of the way they had entered the headquarters, after all. 

Domino glanced backwards, and growled. “Future Sight, then Slash!” 

J tensed. The latter attack could not be meant for either of their Pokemon. Dragon’s skin was too dense to penetrate even for an Absol’s blade, and the Ghost was out of the question simply by being what he was. That left the two humans as potential targets. 

“To the right!” And just as she had expected it, the Absol turned around to face the psychic, who, thankfully, had had the same trail of thoughts as J did and dodged the attack gracefully. She landed next to Giovanni, and the two found themselves staring at each uncomfortably for a moment. 

The Rocket boss shrugged. “Do whatever you have to do. I am curious as to how you’ll fare against my agents.” He smiled. “Quite curious indeed.” 

J raised an eyebrow. What was he talking about…? 

“Aerial Ace!” 

She barely had time to complete that thought before the wind attack hit her from behind and swirled her forward. She bumped hard into her own Salamence, which had seen its trainer being knocked off her feet, so it had positioned itself in front her before she could actually be pushed out of the room and towards the glass windows. 

Snarling, J jumped onto the Dragon’s back and turned around to face the annoying Absol, only to realize that she must have hit her head on something else as well, as she was seeing doubles… 

“What the hell?” 

“Forgot about us already?!” A familiar voice called out to her, before the man it belonged to was silenced by the lascivious woman dangling from his arm. 

J rolled her eyes. “Oh great, the elites…” She sighed. “Don’t you think that is a little bit unfair, two elite trainers and a…mediocre Rocket agent against two average trainers?” She glanced at Sabrina, hoping not to have offended her with the categorization, but Sabrina didn’t seem to mind much. 

“Pot calling the kettle back, old hag!” Domino hissed. 

It was a good thing her reflexes were fast, for having your head bitten off by an irritated Dragon was, all while a fast, also a particular gruesome death. 

J, by now very much fed up with the girl, grabbed for one of her own knives. She wasn’t intending to kill Domino, but handicapping her enough for her to be left out of the fight should be enough to give them the amount of time they needed to make for an escape. It had been, she mused now, a foolish idea from the very beginning to try to bring Giovanni down. And for as long as both of them still breathed and were capable of moving by themselves, by Arceus, she had the chance to do away with him. So who cared if it was not today? Maybe it wasn’t meant to be. Some things just weren’t. Sometimes, waiting for the right moment ultimately proved to be more satisfying than forcing yourself upon one revenge that was, in the end, nothing more than insults and spitting. 

Turning around from her elevated position, J didn’t even need to aim for Domino much. More or less blindly, she hurled her knives at the annoying blonde, and, right away, nicked both of Domino’s arms and her ankle. In fact, she had blindly aimed so well that Domino’s Achilles’ tendon was severed, and the girl went to the floor with a scream of anguish and frustration. Seconds later, J found her psychic friend attempting to climb the dragon as well. Sighing underneath a coat of a well hidden smile, J extended her hand to help her up. It was, after all, safer above your enemies, and no one could argue that it wasn’t safer atop a 220lbs dragon, either. 

“What about our head honcho?” J asked. It was a bit hard for her Salamence to maneuver in-between the small room and not to crush anything beneath its stumpy feet, but J couldn’t care less. In fact, she cheered for every rug that was ripped, for every book shelf that fell down the walls, and for every desk that was turned over. 

“He should be asleep…” Sabrina explained, pointing to her Haunter, which had used the chaos to secretly invade Giovanni and his Persian’s privacy and use hypnosis on them. Above all the security measures the boss had installed in his bureau, he had forgotten the obvious, and that was, not only to safeguard himself against psychic attacks, but against ghost attacks as well. J mused that he, just like she herself, had fallen into the trap of believing that they were one and the same, especially since Hypnosis was a psychic attack, but utilized by a ghost type, the effect seemed to be different, just like Curse was a scientifically fascinating attack. 

“Well done…you should really think about joining the law enforcement business…” J grinned. No way Sabrina was ever going to do that, and if, by some miracle or spur of a stupid moment, she would, well, J was certain there was no need for her to feel anxious. 

Sabrina almost smiled, and yet, she did not have the time to complete the gesture. Not because of who she was- that was certainly a factor that contributed to her falling back into stoicism, but rather because she had to duck under a psybeam send by the Xatu of the second psychic trainer in the room. “Don’t want to belittle us, but I think we’re not up to the elite challenge yet…” J paused. “Don’t even have a single badge yet, until you have pity on me and…” 

“No.” 

J shrugged. “Well, it was worth a try. …nevertheless, I think we should beat loose before we get beaten.” She pointed her finger at the glass walls behind them, already in the process of throwing her cape protectively over the two of them. “Salamence, Hyper Beam! We need an emergency exit!” 

The future, so even J knew, was a very fickle thing. Unless you were born of supernatural origin, it was not possible to predict the future, and even if, you only got a glimpse into what could happen, and never certainty for what would really happen, after all. You were left with grains of events, all as traceable as air itself for the mere human mind. 

She did see the gasp that suddenly formed on Sabrina’s face, and she also saw that her friend tried to tell her something, but it was too late, way too late. The future sight sent out by Domino’s Absol minutes ago, sadly, forgotten by both of them, suddenly appeared out of nowhere, swirled through the room like a horizontal tornado, and then knocked Salamence off its feet. The attack itself wasn’t even that strong, but it had the advantage of taking the dragon by full surprise, and with it, its two riders. 

J crashed into the bookshelf on the far left of the room, taking with her uncounted pages of books on ground Pokemon, business plans, and, strangely, masses of recipes for alcoholic drinks that would make her older brother proud. She ripped through the paper like a shredder, and a very angry one at that, before she managed to get safely back onto her feet. 

The psychic had been less fortunate, as she fell with her back onto Giovanni’s desk and was momentarily knocked out by the impact. It was mere coincidence that Salamence again tumbled in front of her and managed to block the Psybeam that headed straight for her. Shivering, and shaking her head, the psychic rolled over to the other side, before stumbling to get onto her feet again. Being as dazed as she was, she didn’t notice that one of the Absol had jumped onto the desk and taken aim from there. J half-expected the horn to glow in sinister black again, and indeed, a swirling shadow formed around the scythe, but unlike before, it didn’t keep its form, but extended outwards, like a balloon being inflated. 

Just when it had the right size to swallow a human full, did J hear the command from across the room, uttered by the mysterious and slightly intimidating elite four known as Karen. “Dark Void!” 

And that was when the Absol jumped upwards, and swirled its head to the side, letting loose a sphere of pure black. J was sure she had wanted to scream, or at least open her mouth, but she was paralyzed, and not in a tangible, physical way. 

It was more of a mind-numbing handicap that had engulfed her, that made the world around her slow down to a painful stand-still, until every picture her eyes took in clicked away into darkness whenever she blinked, and was replaced by its equally or more disturbing successor. The dark void attack swallowed the gym leader full, but she did not disappear totally, neither from J’s view, nor from the world in general. She was merely darkened like a shape in twilight, eyes widened until, rather suddenly, they rolled backwards and she stumbled, falling so that only the barest of silhouettes of her was visible anymore. 

J was screaming silently, and even she felt disgusted by the irony of that. She wanted to holler, to yell, to release her fury at anything and everyone, but she choked on it. She could neither say nor think anything, safe for the blind anger and fear that was as animalistic as the most basic instincts she possessed. 

It shouldn’t have been a surprise to Karen and Will to see J abandoning her Pokemon and coming straight for them, knife ready. She punched Domino again, who had the misfortune of laying in her way, and ripped the tulip-stab out of the girl’s hands. It was an pathetic weapon for a pathetic girl, but as with all things, under the tutorship of a skilled expert, even this brittle stick could prove to be useful for more than picking one’s nose. J managed to keep the Absol at bay simply by poking its eye and discovering that Domino’s tulip had a fine, in-build taser, she didn’t waste any time sending the Xatu out of the sky, and straight into the frying pan as it twisted and twitched. 

“That’s not fair!” Will exclaimed, putting his hands on his cheeks in earnest shock. J’s response was to ram the other end of the stick into his groin, earning her the response she had been waiting for. 

She was halfway through the room, having beaten her enemies by sheer virtue of being blinded by fury, when the only part of the glass walls that hadn’t caved in yet finally gave up and crumbled as the gigantic force of the Dragonite’s palm reached inward. Giovanni, aiming for the Nobel prize in calmness, stood by its side, and smirked. “Can’t let you win, Miss Hunter, I’m afraid.” He frowned. “And I must say, I’m really impressed with you. I’m starting to regret never even trying to recruit you…” 

“Over my dead body!” J snarled, and jumped to the side. She wasn’t aiming for Giovanni. Hell, she wasn’t even aiming to save her own life anymore. All she had had eyes for in the past minutes was the motionless body of the psychic, left behind by the harbinger of disaster. Her mind was left partly blank, and yet, she was so focused nothing and no one could have stopped her advance, not even the mutant Dragonite that now tried to grab her and use her as its toy, or, alternatively, bite off her head to see if she tasted as nicely as she looked like. 

She felt she had every reason to panic, though. She was left alone with her enemies, and although she had managed to hold them off for a while, chances were this was only temporary relief from a defeat that would inevitably come. J, though, didn’t mind. She had lost someone dear to her once, and she had not been able to be there for Miya, had not been able to hold her hand, speak to her, or even attend her funeral, because there had been nothing to bury. It was sarcasm, biting, sour sarcasm, she knew, but at this time, the last thing she could make sure of was that she retrieved the physical remains. She didn’t want to consciously succumb to the possibility, but evidence spoke against the psychic having survived, seeing as how she hadn’t moved at all during the ruckus, not even to try and reach safety herself. 

J came to a slithering halt next to Sabrina, almost missing her by centimeters when she had to jump over a thunderbolt attack, origin unknown. For all she knew, it could have been her own Pokemon firing it in order to help her, but it wasn’t as if J cared. 

She just kneeled there, shaking as she gently petted the psychic’s hair, still finding her to be unresponsive. She wasn’t cold at all, but J had, more or less unfortunately, enough experience with death to know that this was no reliable indicator at all. The parapsychological was a field fully unknown to her, but even she had enough brain cells in her to figure what a powerful dark attack like Dark Void could and would do to a psychic that suffered from numbness even when only her hand had been nicked. And this time, she had been engulfed fully in the strange energy, with no escape left. 

J would have been ready to die then and there. She was by no means truly depressed enough to be suicidal. In her métier, it was more of a headless intake of risks that far overtook your abilities and luck, and once you were out of your guardian angel’s reach, you were up to prayers and hope. J knew this, had been there, done that. 

But she had also been at the point where she had lost a friend and had, by days and weeks realized how many missed chances had been buried along with Miya under tons of snow. Her life, following Miya’s death, had descended into a spiral of living just for the job, making snarky remarks at her only kind of family left, and disregarding anyone who tried to be close to her, unless it proved to be of an incredible advantage for her. It had sounded so easy, accompanying a helpless freak of a gym leader for a ball in order to get your freedom back, and then, never having to hear anything about her anymore. 

And here she was, actually wishing for herself to be able to cry, but finding her eyes totally dry. Had she actually forgotten how to cry? Had her reservoir of tears dried up in the weeks following Miya’s death? She could not recall herself crying back then, but then, she had shoved back quite a few memories until they were nothing more than distant shapes in the back of her mind. 

And died she would have, certainly, if not for the intervention of one by the name of her brother. 

J didn’t notice it at first. Surely, what she was about to see was breathtaking, amazing and simply mindblowing, but given that she was grieving over a soul mate she had only realized she had had and had immediately lost again, she could be forgiven not realizing that her brother was flying by the cracked glass walls. 

Situated atop a Giratina. 

Because we cannot talk about legendaries in the singular again, as they obviously exist in pairs or come in one dozen right away. 

Outside of the room, just past J’s point of view, an epic, but fairly short battle between Giratina and the Dragonite raged, with glowing, fierce Dragon attacks exchanged, claws digging into skin and bones, shrieks of anger ripping apart ear drums, and nightly ghostly beams finally knocking out the Dragonite, as it tripped and crashed into several buildings, one of them being the finance office of Saffron, which would certainly not be mourned by anyone of a right mind. 

And above all of that, Zero was, screaming so loudly an outsider could either believe him to be dying of panic, ecstasy or because he was having the greatest orgasm of his life. 

Knowing Zero, it was likely a combination of all three. 

Truly, Giratina and its rider were a sight to behold, unless one was in a state where not even God itself could comfort you anymore. And J would have cursed Arceus even if he had suggested to her bringing back both of her dead friends, because no resurrection could ever extinguish the pain of having lost someone dear to you in the first place. 

Zero, though, was not fazed. 

“Hey, what’s up, sis?” 

Clearly, meeting the one Pokemon of his dreams, and being able to touch it, and ride it, and _command it_ (or being under the delusion of commanding it) had clouded his mind so much he could not see that his sister was in no state to talk to him. Or anyone else, actually. 

Zero blinked, scratching his hair. “Sis, you’re okay there…?” 

Only someone who was evidently in love with the ghoul of the underworld could assume that a woman crying over the lifeless body of her almost-lover could be okay. 

“FUCK OFF, ZERO!!!” 

Or else someone who was in the possession of knowledge that would clarify the situation… 

“Um, sis…you _do_ know about the effects of Dark Void, do you?” 

J paused. Everyone else paused in their breathing as well, as if Zero had just asked the final, one-million dollar question and now the audience was left wondering whether their favourite candidate could pull through, or go down the drain. 

J was silent. There was nothing she could say. It was hard enough thinking right now, so saying anything would have overtaxed her nervous system and caused a short circuit capable of rendering her incapable of thinking for the rest of her life. And while there were individuals for whom this would have made next to no difference, J clearly would have been in trouble. 

A polite cough reminded her that she was not alone, but J, non too pleased by any intervention, simply threw another knife after the source of interruption, and scared Karen by hitting the bookshelf next to her. J had never been one to miss her targets, that was one, if not the only lesson she had copied from Miya herself. „What do you mean…“ J asked, slowly, as she literally had to force every word out of her throat. “…about the effects of Dark Void?” 

For some, it was an advantage of having a nerdy brother. For others, it was fate’s cruel punishment. 

Zero blinked, before his voice turned gum-like and sour. “…you really have no idea, do you?” 

It was his luck, pure unadulterated luck, that Zero was sitting on a Giratina, and even J would not dare to attack the dark Pokemon. Not until she had her bronze cannon back. “No, dear baby brother kin, I do not have any idea about the effects of Dark Void, because otherwise, I would not be forced to address you politely and ask you a question when I would rather rip my tongue out and boil it in fish soup than to converse with you, so spare me any more wise-crackers and tell me what the hell-let Giratina forgive me the pun, you are babbling about!” 

Zero, fully aware of his superior position, let the seconds drag on, before he as much felt inclined. “She’s just asleep, Jean!” He rolled his eyes, crossed his arms behind his head and leaned back. “That’s the effect of Dark Void. It puts you to sleep. Nothing more.” 

J froze. And looked down. 

And just sure enough, as if to humiliate her depowered ego already, she could plainly see that the psychic was not only breathing now, but that her eyes were moving behind her eyelids, indicating a state of dreaming. 

“No comment. I cannot guarantee anyone’s survival otherwise.” J hissed, and strangely- or not so strangely, given the situation they were in, even Karen and Will immediately fell shut. No one wanted to get their throat slit open with a stiletto when the main battle was as good as over already. 

J took a deep breath. It was as much for stabilizing herself as it was for ensuring everyone else’s safety, as well as regaining control over her vibrating voice. 

“….how can I wake her up?” 

Zero shrugged. Didn’t his sister realize that he was no trainer? His knowledge of Pokemons’ attacks was very limited, as his brain was filled to the brim with stuff more important, like quantum physics or the probability of a two-headed albino deerling being born,and it was sheer luck that one of his particular interests was the field of dark Pokemon attacks, and dark void was, by more than just definition, a dark attack. 

J groaned. “Should I shake her up then?” 

Zero would have rolled his eyes, but average human interactions were troublesome to his intellect enough, so he could forgo the sarcasm. “…do you want to have to read ‘killed herself by scaring a psychic shitless’ on your tombstone?” 

“Well, if mister smarty-no-pants has any better idea, I’d like to hear it now!” 

“I don’t know, maybe she’ll need a true lover’s kiss?” He asked with a wink that was just barely hidden enough to guard him from sudden assaults. 

Karen’s attempt at snickering was answering by a flying dagger cutting off the blinds behind her, and clubbing Will in the back of his head with the curtain rail. 

“…no…” 

Zero shrugged. “Hey, don’t look at me, I’m no Prince Charming material!” His eyes blazed. “I’m more of the villain type, you know?” 

“Mook, you mean. And what the hell do you think, should I just lean over and smooch her?!” 

Zero would have shrugged again if not for the boringness of such a repetition. “Sure. Try it out. Can’t hurt to, can it?” 

“It can hurt you, you should know.” 

“Oh, I think I am safe where I am, on sweet Gira-chans back…” Said it, and leaned forward to gently, passionately, pet Giratina’s neck. 

J had to think of pleasant things fast, like her older brother being gutted, to keep herself from gagging. “Forget it. I’m not going to kiss her.” 

“Why not?” Zero had always been an expert at the century-old game of asking why, and J still blamed their father for not spanking him as punishment. And yet, when he asked J this question, there was the tiniest twinkle of sadness hidden within the corners of his eyes. 

J glanced downwards, towards Sabrina, first. 

Then towards her brother. 

Then back to Sabrina. 

And then she sighed. 

“Because she’s awake, you dumbass. She just twitched.” 

To her defense, J didn’t have much time to react. In fact, she had literally no time to react, as she wasn’t even allowed to finish the last word before she was tackled from behind by a psychic smiling brightly, squeaking in a fully out of character joy that was accompanied by her cuddling a very much baffled J who did not even have the nerve- or chance, really, to scuttle away. Instead, she felt her cheeks heat up and as much as she wished for, she didn’t even feel the urge to throttle someone, not even her brother, who smiled this goofy smile of his that meant he was delighted in a very unsettling, throughout way that was usually the trigger for J to box his chin in until he was wearing it as a necklace. 

“You would have done it!” Sabrina smirked, still smiling so brightly it was a miracle she was able to open her mouth wide enough to talk at all. “Be honest, you’d have done it!” 

“Done what?” J snarled, and although she played the role of the unwilled victim, she was anything but fighting to get out of Sabrina’s embrace. More than anything, she was trying to appear as defensive as possible, while the goosebumps overrode her rational senses. 

“You know!” Sabrina chirped, pinning J down so that she was sitting straightly- at least in the physical sense, over her. 

J glared daggers at her, but it proved useless, and so, she sighed. “Mhhh, yeah, I guess so.” 

“Prove it!” 

“What?” J wasn’t too sure, but there was a certain lack of sense in the statements uttered by the psychic that frightened her, and confused her. 

“Prove it!” Sabrina said again, rolling her shoulders and leaning forward for emphasis. 

If J’s cheeks had been aflame before, they were positively an inferno now, and her ears were starting to burn off. Still, her mouth formed words without the consultation of her brain. “Zero…?” 

Her younger brother sighed, before saluting her. “Okay, got it, sis. Let’s go, Gira-chan! And let’s take these dorks with us, eh?” Giratina gave off a sound of agreement- or else, the hellish symphony of dragging souls downwards with it into the river of damnation, and grabbed Will and Karen with that might be its hands, or tentacles of darkness, as it slowly drifted away. 

J stared ahead, face still flushed now with something more than embarrassment. “You should know….it has been a while since I’ve kissed anyone…” 

Sabrina shrugged. “That does not bother me. I have no experience at all.” 

“You have no…” 

Obviously, J didn’t get to finish her sentence, and obviously experience was not a thing to be questioned mere moments later. 

J briefly, subconsciously, mused how convenient the skill of telepathy was when one’s mouth was busy elsewhere. 

“Yeah, sure, sure…” She breathed, and sincerely, it wasn’t much more than a single breath that came out of her mouth before it was shut down again. 

Seconds later - it might have been minutes, too, J wasn’t entirely sure, Sabrina broke the first with a frown. “I think I hit Giratina instead.” 

J’s mind was too rumbled to question the logic behind. In general, she was past the point where looking for common sense was part of her agenda, anymore. “And?” 

“He might plum to his death if Giratina faints…” 

J grinned. “That, my dear, is not my problem.” She reached forward, for the psychic’s neck, as she found her only concern to be her stiff and cold gloves. 

Scene Change

Days later, J was sitting in her ship, admiring her new cannon. She had to admit, sending her brother away had been a less than brilliant idea, but accidentally shooting him off Giratina had been outright foolish. They had still needed to acquire the dark beast’s power to finish off the Dragonite, before she had been able to trap it within a metal coat with her new cannon. Which her engineers had been able to put together just in time to save her ass, and their own heads from being brutally broken off their necks in a family unfriendly way. 

She supposed the Dragonite was better off in the hands of a capable trainer, and even she had to admit that the most capable in this regard was, indeed, Champion Lance, but something within her shuddered simply at the thought of working together with the legal forces, still. It felt as if she was betraying some part of herself. 

She sighed. She needed to go back to her old ways of thievery, even if it was just for a short time. A little rampage here, a small wreckage there, something to get her blood boil over again. Something to cause a riot and make people shiver when they heard her single letter name again, instead of cooing and awing over the fact that she was romancing a gym leader… 

Speaking of… 

“You did not lock your door.” 

“I was expecting you.” J grinned. In fact, she had not locked her door for the past week, in the hopes that the psychic would finally show up. “You’re late.” J pouted. 

“I had…things to take care of.” Which absolutely did not involve aspersing Will and Karen and getting their asses kicked out of the league and right into the next jail cell, of course. 

No, Will and Karen made two formidable dolls, after all. 

J sighed. “It’s a shame, you know…I wish I could have finished off Giovanni…I doubt I’ll get any second chance with him…” She flexed her fingers. He had been gone by the time she had woken up out of the daze that was absolutely not caused by making out in the ruins of a former mafia headquarter. Such a thing only happened in movies. 

“Aside from the fact that revenge is never a solution…it wouldn’t have been a true reversal. This wasn’t Giovanni.” 

“It…was not?” 

“No. It was Petrel.” 

“That asshole!” J exclaimed, and found herself jumping to her feet as she started to pace through the room. “That cheating, lying, motherfucking asshole.” She hissed, and clutched the door handle hard in her hands. Sabrina stayed silent, as there was nothing she could do anyway to stop J’s repressed raging. She waited until she thought J had calmed down sufficiently enough before she asked her next question. “So….Jean…what are you going to do now?” 

J shrugged. “I don’t know, I…don’t expect me to turn over to the light side, okay? I was born a criminal, I am a criminal, and I will die a criminal, and nothing you say or do will change anything about that. I might have gone soft, and done one or another legal thing, but I am still a villain at heart.” 

Sabrina smiled warmly. “I never intended to change anything about that, Jean.” 

The hunter grinned back. “And as for my future plans…well, there’s this guy named…Miles? Cyprus? I…forgot, I’m afraid, but he has some nice tasks for me over in Sinnoh. I’ll do that first, and….” She shrugged. “Who knows? I haven’t been to Saffron in a while, I wonder if the county jail still stands.” 

Sabrina, though she had frowned, first smiled. “So I’ll see you?” 

“You bet.” J would have almost, almost, winked back, but she was aware of her crew listening in on them, anyways. 

Sabrina was about to teleport away, satisfied with what she’d heard so far, and yet, she turned around, her face slightly concerned. “Take care, will you?” 

“Of course.” J grumbled. “No need to worry about me.” 

Sabrina nodded slowly, even as she faded away. “I’ll be waiting there for you, then.” 

End Smooth Criminal 3


End file.
